


Vitrify

by element78



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Monsters, and monster-hunting, as associated with high fantasy settings, jason is a prince, minor depictions of blood and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 13:10:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15365379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/element78/pseuds/element78
Summary: There's a monster in the deserts of the kingdom of Nanda Parbat, and Prince Jason- having just lost his claim to the throne- decides to go slay it in order to prove himself still worthy, accompanied only by one exasperated blue-eyed guardsman.Yeah, this will end well.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LullabyDance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LullabyDance/gifts).



> One day, I will enter into a fic challenge without regarding the minimum word requirement as a challenge to be utterly defeated. One day. This is not that day.
> 
> The society of Nanda Parbat is entirely fictional, and is not based on or intended to resemble any real-world cultures. I tried to ground it into reality a little better by having it be a proper kingdom, instead of a cabal of assassins lurking in the desert for some nonsense comics-logic reason.

They told him later that it was a nice ceremony, as somber and respectable as circumstances demanded. They told him Damian looked every inch like the king he was to become, that he himself ceded that right with enviable grace, that Talia was genuinely happy for them both. They told him it was lovely, and Damian was handsome in his robes of royalty blue, and the hall was resplendent with color and life in a way it had not seen in years.

They had to tell him these things, for Jason remembered only snatches of it, his attention hyperfocused on the smallest of things. The set of Damian’s jaw, after his voice cracked midword and a titter had run through the audience. The wrinkled, age-spotted hands of the magistrate who had taken the crown from Jason’s head and put it on Damian’s. Talia’s small, proud smile when Jason stood too numb to speak in protest. The endless sensation of falling, as though the ground had been snatched out from under him, as though he were a bird in a storm.

He also remembered eyes, royalty blue like Damian’s robes, watching him the entire time.

* * *

The feast afterwards was equally as lovely, and Jason knew that one for himself, as he was actually present for most of it. Nothing immediately noticeable had changed- Talia still sat at the point of the teardrop-shaped table, Jason to her left and Damian to her right, food tasters stationed politely behind them, guardsmen mostly absent in an open challenge to potential assassins. But for the first time since he had been forced to attend one of these celebratory feasts, Jason was not sitting next to an attractive young woman his own age. All the girls had moved over to Damian’s side of the table, and were making him blush unhappily under the weight of their attention. Jason had instead the attention of a fat old lord whose star had descended with Ra’s al Ghul’s bloody end, and who liked to drop honeyed insults in between courses.

“You are handling this well,” he said, when the pretty girl he kept on hand to serve him personally had swept his bread plate away. “When my father told me my brother was to inherit my title, I poisoned his wine every day for a month.”

“I did believe you would have been good for Nanda Parbat,” he said, when the girl was trying to balance a heavy platter of lamb on one hand and a jug of wine in the other. “The al Ghuls have served us well enough, but some new blood to shake things up has never hurt anything.”

“I suppose you will have to find something to do with yourself now,” he said when the girl was pouring honey over fruit. “There is always diplomacy. You could travel, represent Nanda Parbat in whatever northern hellhole Queen Talia first rescued you from-” and that was too much; Jason slammed one hand down on the heavy wood of the table and turned on him-

“Your Highness,” a new voice said, a body leaning between Jason and his antagonizer, royalty-blue eyes watching him yet again. “There’s a matter that requires your attention.”

The lord looked startled, scowling unhappily at the guardsman’s nerve. To insert himself, metaphorically and physically, into a conversation between two of his betters was unspeakable- but Jason seized on the chance and was rising to his feet before the lord could rally his wits.

“Forgive me,” he said to the lord, using his height to glare down at the man, allowing his fury to show with a teeth-baring grin. The guardsman wisely stepped out of the way, standing back at Jason’s elbow. “We will have to continue this discussion another time.”

“Of course,” the lord said, looking actually cowed for a moment, as though he had only just realized that Jason was a big man, and the guardsman’s interruption had been to the lord’s benefit, not the prince’s.

He followed the guardsman out of the hall, down one of the small corridors leading to an antechamber. As soon as the door was shut behind him he stopped, lowering his head and allowing his shoulders to curve inward just enough to ease off that tight band of pressure that has been wrapped around his lungs for days. He did not collapse back against the door, or sit down, or slump too far- not with the guardsman nearby, soft footsteps sounding his return when he realized the prince no longer followed him. He just took the moment to breathe.

“You have nothing to say?” he asked. It was a stupid question, born of a foolish desire to cut himself open and watch himself bleed. He wanted to hurt, to bruise and break. He wanted to feel anything instead of the cottony _nothing_ that had settled under his skin.

“No, Your Highness,” the guardsman said, and he sounded frustratingly blank. No dark twist of sarcasm for Jason to take offense at, no pity for him to rail against. Jason lifted his head and looked at him, and those bold blue eyes stared right back, meeting his gaze without flinching.

His name was Richard or something- Jason never pronounced it right, and he had given up correcting him after the first few times. He had come to Nanda Parbat three years ago, months after Ra’s’ death, seeking a private audience with Talia. They had both come away from the meeting angry and refusing to discuss it, but Talia had installed him in the rank that very night. 

Jason had been seventeen at the time, and he had encountered Richard at his various posts many times in the citadel’s halls, and had spent several frustrating, lonely, sweaty nights with those blue eyes haunting his dreams. It was a phase he had mostly grown out of.

“So what is the matter that requires my attention?” he asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Richard admitted. “A visitor came and asked an audience with _someone important_.” There, emotion- he sneered the words, disdain in his gaze, cracks showing in that blank mask. He wore it close when he was around certain people, and let it slip when he was around others. It was oddly flattering, that Jason was counted among the latter.

“As important as a disgraced prince?” Jason asked.

“More important than a royal page, at any rate,” the guardsman replied calmly, still refusing to let himself be drawn into a fight. Jason turned away from him with an impatient noise and smoothed his hands down the front of his robes- heavy silk weighty with golden embroidery and small gemstones, suitable for wearing only in the cool safety of the citadel. He was just Talia’s stray, picked up on a whim and discarded now that a proper heir was ready to take his place. But he looked important enough to impress their visitor, at least.

“Where?” he asked simply.

“An inner gate chamber,” the guardsman said, and Jason glanced back at the door to the great hall once before he turned away without another word.

* * *

The citadel that was the heart of the kingdom of Nanda Parbat was layered like an onion- the outer walls protecting farms fed by underground canals from the river that had etched out the canyon, the main walls siege-worthy and set to protecting the main city. The palace was carved into the cliff face that the citadel sat back against and had never, in its thousands of years of history, been taken by invading forces. Because it was inside a hollowed-out mountain, the palace was cool and damp and dark, only its outermost walls having any sort of windows.

Their visitor was just barely inside the palace, left in a chamber set high enough above the city that arrows and siege ladders could not reach it. The entire outer wall was a window three times as tall as Jason and half as broad, set with a stunning pattern of stained glass that glowed in the late afternoon sunlight and threw a rainbow of colors across the room. It had survived the purge Ra’s had instigated against all needlessly pretty things in the last few years of his rule, mostly because of the sheer impracticality of replacing it all with plain clear glass. Not for all the kings in the world would glass forges burn hotter, nor glass melt and cool faster. Even the mighty Ra’s al Ghul had had his limits.

The stranger was a woman, long dark hair tied back into a complicated tangle of braids that were liberally laced with silver, body whipcord-lean and strong under her tunic and riding robes. She was sitting on a stool eating figs and pomegranate seeds off a plate balanced on her knees, rudely sucking on fruit-sticky fingers, and she barely glanced over when Jason first walked in. Her swordbelt sat empty, at least, her weapons safely confiscated, so Jason dismissed the pair of guards left at the door and headed across the chamber to her.

Then she turned to face him, and he slowed for a moment. She had sun-leathered and wind-scoured skin, eyes dark and bright like chips of obsidian, and elaborate markings on her face, starting at her temples and branching down the sides of her face. Nomad’s markings, signalling her clan and her role within it.

Richard did not put himself between the nomad and Jason, although Jason had a feeling that was due mostly to his own long stride making it too difficult for the guard to catch up fast enough. He came up beside him instead, a step ahead but not between Jason and the woman, one hand resting too-casually on the hilt of his own sword. Jason ignored him in favor of focusing on the nomad.

“You wanted to speak to someone important?” he asked, watching her eye him up and down, watching her take in the heavy silk, the thumbnail-sized stones.

“Yes,” she said, and bent down to set her plate on the floor, then rose to her feet. Richard tensed but otherwise did not move, but she watched him all the same, gaze heavy and indolent as it rested on him. “And you are?”

She seemed to be talking to Richard, but Jason answered all the same. “Prince Jason.”

“Oh,” the nomad said, sounding genuinely startled, and looked over at him again. Either she had not heard the news yet, or simply didn’t care for the political maneuverings of a kingdom she passed through like a shadow and owed no loyalty towards- she looked at Jason with grudging respect now, and a dark sort of humor. “Very important indeed.”

“Yes, and I have very important business to attend to,” Jason said impatiently, gesturing for her to get on with it. She smiled, and it was not a friendly smile.

“Well, prince, you have a monster in your lands.”

“Ridiculous,” Jason replied instantly. The al Ghuls had held Nanda Parbat strong against threats such as invading forces and vicious creatures for centuries without fail, a steep task indeed in a desert land with no real borders.

The nomad gave him a carefully blank look, then turned her fever-bright gaze away. “Is that what you think, Romani?” she asked. Jason was a prince, in command of himself and the world around him, he did not blink in surprise at words he didn’t know- but he did this time, and followed her gaze to Richard, who stood still and silent, his eyes burning with surprising fury.

“What did you call me?” he asked in a confused voice, daring her to repeat herself or clarify, and she smiled and laughed and turned away.

“It’s in the wastes near the border,” she said. She picked up the cloth satchel she had left on the ground by the stool and flipped it open and reached in, slowly, carefully pulling out- something. She stared at Richard as she set it on the seat of the stool and then backed away, allowing the two men to move closer and look.

It was a strange substance, a solid chunk of hazy translucent yellow material, shaped in a broad arch with the outside curve smooth and the inside curve jagged and long like a predator’s teeth. One end of the arch was shiny and striated, like it had been a piece broken off from a much larger whole.

The guardsman stepped forward, already pulling the gloves off of his belt and pulling them on. Ever mindful of potential poison and assassination attempts, Jason tucked his own hands behind his back and let him pick it up without comment. It took both hands, heavier than it looked, more solid.

“It’s glass,” Richard said in quiet surprise, and Jason blinked and frowned at him and looked at it anew. And now he could see it- it had broken like glass breaks, at the shiny end.

“Out west,” Jason realized. The area around the citadel and settled lands of Nanda Parbat were rocky and red-tinted. This had to have come from the west, where the sand matched the yellow color of the glass. The desert beyond the western border was intractable and uncrossable, vast and oven-hot and with no oases or large rock formations to provide shelter or shade.

“How hot does a fire have to burn to melt pure sand into glass?” he asked quietly, hating that he didn’t already know that answer. He looked over at the wall of glass, the fragile beauty that had survived Ra’s al Ghul because it was too expensive to replace.

“Hotter than a steel forge,” Richard replied just as softly. “I saw something like this once, where lightning had struck a beach and melted the sand into glass. It was shaped like lightning, though, not like this.” He turned the glass chunk over in his hands, careful not to let its jagged teeth scratch as his wrists. “This looks like a splash pattern.”

It took a moment to visualize what he meant, but then Jason understood- the arching stain after someone threw a glass of wine across a room, or a blood vessel cut open. But that would mean the monster in the desert-

“It breathes fire?” he asked, loud enough for the nomad to properly hear without having to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping.

“A safe guess,” she said, nodding to the glass chunk. “That was from a way station of ours. It also burned down a shepherd’s village on your land.”

A shepherd’s village, a gathering of huts for shepherds and their flock to take shelter in should a sandstorm roll in off the desert. Jason would send a rider out first thing in the morning to check for himself and decide from there, but first- the nomad.

“Is that all you know?” he asked, and when she spread her hands as if to ask if that truly was not enough, he added, “You came here expecting a reward.”

“For helping protect your kingdom from such a threat,” the nomad said, and Jason’s temper kindled. Far be it for them to do something out of kindness- they passed through the kingdom, ignorant and disrespectful of the laws, and now demanded rewards for showing a shred of human decency.

Richard still had the glass chunk in his hands. Jason stepped towards him and pulled the short knife from his belt, noticing but ignoring the way he went perfectly still, as though he were withholding an instinctive reaction to such a violation. Jason pressed the knife against his sternum, digging its sharp tip under a dust-colored stone and pressed until it tore free of the web of threads holding it down.

“Here,” he said, and tossed it to the nomad, who scrambled after it like a stray dog snapping after a scrap of food. 

He turned back to the guardsman, who had set the glass chunk down and was pulling his gloves off, and who took the knife without a word. Jason was half-expecting a comment on the willful destruction of such expensive clothing, but Richard’s face was blank again.

“Escort her to the city walls,” Jason ordered, and the guardsman bowed his head as Jason turned and strode out of the room.

He had to send out a rider, had to tell Talia of this new threat, had to decide what he himself was going to do about it. He absolutely was not hiding from the feast, from his new reality as the useless spare.

A monster in the kingdom, he thought, a monster that breathed fire hot enough to melt sand, and in the cool dark of the hallway with no one around to see, he shivered.

* * *

For all that things had changed, they had also remained the same; Jason walked into Damian’s quarters the following day and found him bent over his scrolls and his books, a frown etching itself permanently into the lines of his face as he focused.

“What do you want?” he snapped at Jason, his normal dramatics touched with an edge of genuine hostility. No doubt those whispers Jason had been hearing last night had been whispered to Damian too, poisonous treasonous things, things like how Jason would be crown prince once more if he simply removed Damian from the equation entirely. Never mind that the only way Jason was getting the throne now was over Talia’s dead body, literally, and fuck the kid if he really thought Jason would resort to such measures.

“Morning, kingling,” he said with a sharp grin, leaning against the doorframe in an effort to achieve normality. “I see you haven't yet dismissed your tutors. Weren’t you telling Talia every day for years that you would do that the second you could?”

Damian flushed. “I don’t see her wasting good tutoring on _you_ ,” he snarled, but he had relaxed somewhat, and this- this was easy. A nice round of Bait the Brat, ask what he came for and leave, and it would be as it had always been between them.

“I learned all of that when I was younger than you,” Jason said. He liked learning, liked reading, and even now would fall upon and devour any new books added to their library.

Damian, surprisingly, let it go instead of going for the obvious line of attack- _too bad it was wasted on you, some random Northern brat who would never be king_. “What do you want, Todd?” he asked, and Jason sighed and internally scolded himself yet again for telling Damian his family name. He could have claimed not to have one, Damian would have believed that.

He stepped into Damian’s quarters and closed the door behind him, careful to stay on the other side of the room still. It would be a while before Damian trusted him again, probably. “The librarian said you have the bestiary up here somewhere,” he said, scanning his eyes over the pile of books near Damian’s broad work desk.

“Yes,” Damian said, and put his foot proprietarily down on top of the pile. “Why do you need it?”

“Because I do,” Jason snapped back, irritated, and Damian stared at him with his eerie twilight-blue eyes.

“This has something to do with last night, doesn’t it?” he demanded. “When you and Richard disappeared during the feast.”

_Richard_. Jason called him that because he still felt stupid and thick-tongued around the man, and could admit, at least to himself, that he was still a fool for him. Damian called him that because he had taken to Richard completely within a few weeks of his arrival at Nanda Parbat, so thoroughly that if he were a few years older, all the gossip would be about how Richard spent his off-duty hours warming Damian’s bed. Instead, because Damian was a child, the rumor went the other way- that Richard was the man Talia refused to name, Damian’s father. Honestly the relationship did have a paternal feel to it, and Damian had to have gotten his blue eyes from somewhere, and Talia had appointed Richard to a position of trust and authority despite visibly disliking him. But- and it was stupid, and small, and petty- the thought had stung too much, so Jason had dismissed it out of hand and never considered it again.

He let that go, and focused on the important part. “We received word of a creature on the western border,” he said. Damian was to be king, after all, even if he was still just a child now. “It would be nice to have some idea of what it is before we sent soldiers out there to be slaughtered by it.”

He’d sent a scout already, their best rider on one of their fastest horses, hopefully to return within a week. It was not too terribly long a trip to the western border. One merely needed to loop far enough south to get around the long walls of the steep canyon that the citadel was carved into, and then it was two days’ ride straight west on a fast horse, which was part of the problem. The western border was the kingdom’s weakest, the least patrolled and the longest. Talia and those who had come before her had relied on the desert to do the hard work for them, but if this creature could cross the desert at will, there would be others that could as well.

“What does Mother think?” the brat asked, still not moving his foot. Jason was already reconsidering his _don’t be threatening_ approach.

“I haven’t told her yet,” he said, scraping together his patience, because like fuck would he let Damian see him lose it. “I will when I have all possible information, so I need that book.”

Damian stared at him, but slowly lifted his foot and leaned over to pull the bestiary out of the pile. He seemed reluctant to let it go, which was fair- a quick glance showed that he was studying the history of the fourth dynasty of Nanda Parbat, and it was grueling stuff. The rulers of the fourth dynasty had ruled in a time of long peace, the details of which left even the most avid of historians bored out of their skulls, but Damian would still be expected to know names and dates.

“What do you know of this creature?” he asked, putting the bestiary down on top of his current work and opening it at random. The pages were old, vellum instead of the paper stock they had been trading with a land up north for for a century now. They looked dark and thick and greasy in the candlelight.

Jason hesitated, considered, then dared to approach until he was standing before the desk. Damian stayed in his seat, watchful but calm. “It breathes fire hot enough to melt desert sand into glass,” he said, and Damian nodded and looked down at the book, shuffling through pages in search of firebreathers.

He looked tired, Jason noted, dark smudges beneath his eyes, one foot bouncing with exhausted energy. Jason had gotten to sneak away from the feast last night and never return, but Damian had had to suffer through all of it, and had been up until a couple hours before dawn. Add to that the sudden burden of his new responsibilities- the crown on his head was a thin band of gold, and it weighed as much as the world- and it was no surprise the kid wasn’t sleeping.

Jason, for a brief insane moment, wanted to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, wanted to say something like _no one’s expecting you to be perfect, just the best you can be_. But he and Damian were not actually brothers, for all that Talia encouraged them to behave as such. She had proven that she herself did not think so just the previous night. So instead he said, “When you’re done avoiding your studies, bring that to me.”

“I am not avoiding anything,” Damian snapped, expression a sudden rictus of anger. He lifted up the bestiary with one hand and shoved the other book off his desk and onto Jason’s feet with the other. “This is useless. A king needs to do more than just _read_. If there is truly a creature in the desert, I will go slay it.”

And that was why Jason didn’t do encouraging- that was the exact opposite of what he wanted. “Your mother isn’t going to let you go monster hunting,” he scoffed, and knew even as he was saying it that he was only feeding fuel to the fire.

“I do not need my mother’s permission to do what is best for my kingdom,” Damian snapped. “I will not sit uselessly around this palace like _you_.”

He didn’t get mad. It hit like a lightning bolt, like an unexpected blow to the sternum, but Jason remained calm, cold, even though he felt as though he were suddenly standing a great distance away from his body. Damian blinked hard and flushed but stood on his words, clearly preparing to have to fight for it- so Jason did what was best for both of them, and turned and walked away.

“I need it when you’re done,” he heard his own voice say, muffled and echoing. Then he was out in the hallway, the door closing behind him, and then at the end of the hallway staring at the tapestry hung there. It was new, recently acquired on commission from local weaver, a meaningless pattern of bright yellows and greens meant to bring color into the drab stone hallways.

Jason curled his hand into a fist, slow, deliberate. Then he punched the wall hard, then again and again until something popped unpleasantly. His knuckles were raw from the force of the blows, even if the tapestry had saved them from being split open and ruined on the stone behind it, and his third finger bent at an odd angle and alit with fire when he tried to straighten it.

He hadn’t wanted the throne, so losing it was no great loss, even if it left a void in his future he did not yet know how to fill. It was that word- _useless, useless_ \- that scraped across his nerves and made him want to _scream_.

He was going to find that monster in the desert, and he was going to kill it. Let them call him _useless_ then.

* * *

The days after the feast were noisy and active, and Jason did his best to avoid any more confrontations; easy enough, with Talia and now Damian playing the gracious host and seeing visiting nobles off as they left to return to their own walled cities in the desert. Those who remained dined and danced and whispered treason to each other- someone would test their young king, now or shortly after his ascent to king proper, when his hold on his throne was weakest. It was only a matter of who.

Jason took to the library himself. He read over the bestiary, reluctantly pried from Damian’s hands on the third day, until he had narrowed the list down to only a few potentials. He took down the map of the kingdom pinned to the wall and stared at it and plotted out courses and drew imaginary lines on it until he fell asleep slumped over it, and was saved the indignity of drooling on it only by the grace of a vigilant librarian. He took the glass chunk, kindly left for them by the nomad woman, and had it scrubbed clean and took it to the alchemists to run their tests on it and eventually tell him nothing he did not already know.

The ninth day dawned with no sign of the scout returning. Jason stood on the inner wall and watched the city come to life below him, and watched the desert beyond the outer wall, and rolled a clay cup that once held wine between his hands until his grip grew too tight and it cracked.

A noise below drew his attention, and he leaned forward to look. In one of the outside courtyards there was a crowd and movement and, most importantly, a figure dressed in flowing green. He leaned forward against the railing and stared down at them until Talia, guided by instinct or paranoia, turned and looked up at him. She was too far away for facial expressions to show, but she lifted one hand and gestured for him to come down, and he waved back, then turned away to head inside and downstairs.

Time to do this.

* * *

“Damian told me,” Talia said as greeting, when Jason came out into the courtyard and over to stand by her. She was standing against one of the curved walls, tucked into the shadows cast by the canyon wall. The rest of the courtyard was drenched in sunlight, which shone off sweaty bodies and glittered on blood drops like rubies. “There is a monster in my land,” she said, not asking- the Queen never asked a question she did not already know the answer to. She looked at Jason, who in turn watched the men in the courtyard.

“I do not know,” he admitted. One of the men- one of Talia’s own handpicked elite guards and, it was rumored, a skilled assassin- swept in high with a naked blade and blood in his eye. He was a big man and fast despite it, but his opponent was small and lithe and even faster. He dropped low, scraping a knee raw on the sand spread across the courtyard grounds, and swung out a leg and caught the big man about the knees. The big man landed hard, and his opponent rolled up and then back down, using momentum and gravity to lend strength to the blow he landed to the man’s sternum. Not a killing blow, but enough to leave the man curled in on himself and choking. The victor rose to his feet as the crowd around him groaned and cheered, depending on which fighter they had laid their coin on. The guards held these contests once every few weeks, showing off their skills and settling personal disputes and padding their wallets with their earnings. Talia came to watch partly out of tradition, partly to determine who was worthy of recruitment to her personal guard.

“I will send out a scout,” Talia said, and Jason shook his head.

“I already did,” he said, and when her gaze rested on him, a weight he could physically feel, he added, “He’s two days overdue.”

Talia shifted her weight and looked away, watching the fighters. The victor was already facing a new challenger without even enough time to catch his breath between bouts, not that he seemed to be suffering for it- he was fast as ever, slippery as a fish in the water, his opponent unable to lay a finger on him.

“We received a message this morning,” Talia said. “Three days ago, a village near the borderlands was attacked.”

“Burned?” Jason asked, looking directly at her for the first time. She was frowning slightly as she watched the fight, as if annoyed by the current victor’s winning streak.

“Completely,” she said with a nod.

The crowd roared again, and Jason looked over to see the fight was over, the champion’s title defended. He bowed out of the circle, panting and bleeding from shallow cuts and landed punches, and came over to the shadows Talia and Jason were standing in. He kept his distance, slumping down to sit far enough away to lend them privacy, gladly drinking the cup water a servant brought over to him but smart enough not to gulp it down.

“It must be a wyrm,” Talia said, turning her body inward to face Jason and lowering her voice. “They’re firebreathers, and they wander onto our lands sometimes. My father killed the last one when he was younger than you.”

Jason nodded at that, acknowledgement with acquiescence. He’d seen the skull, mounted over the throne and left to moulder for many years. It had vanished shortly after Talia’s coup, probably because she didn’t care for that many needle-sharp teeth hanging just above her head. The monster the skull had once belonged to had been big enough to swallow a man whole.

“How do I kill a wyrm?” he asked.

It took him a moment, longer than he cared to admit, to understand where he had gone wrong. I, not we. He had spent a week training himself out of the habit of using the royal we, since it was no longer his to use.

“You,” Talia said, slow and cold, “are not killing anything.” She stepped closer, reached out and cupped his cheek with her hand and turned his face so he was looking at her. “You are no longer crown prince but you are still very important to Nanda Parbat,” she told him. “I am not risking you on a fool’s errand.”

Jason looked away from her, at the crowd of fighters. She would send them, send them in to be slaughtered. That was what she meant when she said Ra’s had killed a wyrm when he was young- he had commanded its death, and it had died, and so he had killed it. That someone else had landed the killing blow was irrelevant.

“Damian plans on going himself,” he said, to distract her, and Talia’s fingers clenched instinctively as she pulled away, her nails leaving red lines down Jason’s cheek.

“He does not,” she said, all fire and emotion now, when she had been almost uncaring when it had been Jason. He wondered- it hurt even to think it, and he took pleasure in the pain- if she was a bad mother in general, or if Jason’s demotion had made it safe for her to demonstrate her preference for her blood son. She had not been her father’s only child, after all, and she knew the pitfalls that came with royal sibling rivalry.

“I haven’t spoken to him about it recently,” Jason said with an indolent shrug, leaning back against the wall behind him. “But last I heard, he planned on proving his worth as king by slaying it himself.”

Talia’s eyes narrowed, and she spun around on the spot, snapping out a single order, then stormed off through the courtyard door. Several people, mostly women, melted out of the shadowy corners of the courtyard to follow her, silent on their feet like cats. Jason watched her go, then paused.

The fighter who had taken shelter in the shade was watching her as well, his royalty-blue eyes narrowed in thought. He set the empty cup aside and rolled gracefully to his feet and for a moment he looked very tired. Then he smiled, bright and fierce, and headed back towards the circle, which parted with a cheer for the reigning champion. No one would ever guess it was fake, a mask Jason had just watched him put on.

Jason touched his fingertips to his cheek- just scratches, no bleeding- and leaned back against the wall again and stared at the fights, watching without seeing, and started making his plans.


	2. Chapter 2

“It’s not a wyrm.”

The horse, stupid animal, had clearly known about the intruder, because it merely tossed its head and looked over in dumb curiosity when Jason startled badly at the voice. He dropped the saddle in his hands and spun around with one hand on the hilt of the sword he had smuggled out of the armory- but it was that fucking guardsman, sitting on the low wall separating the open-air stables from the courtyard and watching him with an air of quiet amusement. 

“What do you think you are doing,” Jason said, his voice a strange mix between a furious shout and a quiet hiss. The stables were off the city watch’s main patrol routes, but it was deep in the dark hours between midnight and false dawn, and the guards would be watchful for trouble.

Richard swung down and dismounted the wall gracefully. He was dressed for travel like Jason, long loose robes and turban and a scarf pulled up over his face, knife and sword and his favorite weapon of short polished sticks tucked into the loops of the belt. Jason would hardly know it was him were it not for those eyes.

“Everyone in the city knows there’s a monster in the desert,” Richard said. “And now half the city knows both princes are planning to go a-hunting. I am going with you.”

Jason wrapped his hand around the sword’s hilt, tightening his grip until it was physically painful. “You are going nowhere,” he snarled.

“Neither are you, if you try to take that horse,” Richard replied, bold as you please, nodding towards the animal Jason had selected for the journey. “It’s bred for racing, not long travels. That poor thing won’t even make it halfway.”

Jason looked at the horse. It was a sleek chestnut stallion, heart full of hot desert blood and high temper. Richard was absolutely right about its endurance, and Jason hated him for it.

“It’s not a wyrm,” Richard said again. He said it strangely, _vurm_ not _worm_. He had had an accent when he first come to the palace, Jason remembered idly. He had flattened it out into a local street accent in a matter of months, but sometimes there was a strange word or unfamiliar turn of phrase that caught him up and his foreignness was suddenly undeniable.

“That was not a conversation meant for your ears,” Jason said coldly, and Richard bowed at the waist, a mockery of obeisance.

“Of course, Your Highness,” he said. 

Jason should punish him somehow, send him away, have him arrested for his boldness. Instead he took the horse by the bridle and led it back to its stall. He could hear Richard behind him, footsteps purposefully loud on the stone so the horse could track him and would not kick out in surprise. He kept walking when Jason stopped at the stall, and when Jason was done with the horse, he turned to find the man with-

“Camels?” he demanded despite himself, unable to help the scoff. Camels were stubborn and opinionated and evil in a way even the foulest-tempered horse could not be, and Jason had only ridden one just enough to claim proficiency at it.

“Yes,” Richard said, leading the camels out of their paddock in the corner. He had two geared out for a long ride, food packs and bedding tied behind the saddle and full water skins strung sausage-like along their sides. “They’re hardy, good for traveling, and cheap, unless you want everyone we meet knowing who you are.” He patted one of the camels on the neck, and it made a noise like mwhaa and turned to nose at his turban. They seemed to like him, at least, which would make things much easier, except-

“You still are not coming,” Jason said.

“I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t,” Richard pointed out. “You’re no longer crown prince, but you are still a member of the royal family, and my foremost charge is your safety.”

It did not feel like a jest, no needles hidden in the silk of his pretty words. He sounded almost offended that Jason would think so little of his sense of duty. He had pulled the face scarf down and regarded Jason now with a dangerously unguarded expression, like he truly was worried about Jason doing this thing alone. It was disarming, and Jason found himself winding down, lowering his hackles.

“What is it then, if not a wyrm?” he asked, grumbled, annoyed with himself and with Richard. He wanted to stay angry, dammit.

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “But wyrms don’t have legs, they crawl like snakes. They don’t like travelling over sand. There’s no way one would make the journey all the way across the desert. Wyrms come from the south, not the west.”

Jason grunted unhappily, frowning at the camels. He would still rather have a horse, which would be faster even in soft sands and much easier to direct. But if Richard was right and this monster was something unknown, he would be safer observing it from a distance before retreating to somewhere safe to figure out a plan of attack, and camels could roam aimlessly about the desert as much as needed. He sighed in exasperation and paced forward, clucking his tongue at the camel in an order for it to lower itself. Richard smiled his fake pretty smile and turned to his own camel, swinging himself up with the beast’s neck and mounting up without needing it to kneel down.

Because camels were cruel jokes played on humans by the gods, they stood up with their back legs first, leaving Jason rocking in the saddle and certain he was about to fall out as it rose up. The actual riding didn’t help with that, the camel walking in a jerky swaying motion that sent jolts up Jason’s spine. Richard, irritatingly, melted into the saddle and swayed unresisting with the motion.

“Put the scarf on,” Richard said, gentling his voice only enough for it to be a rude request rather than an outright order. “I’ll do the talking at the gate.”

“They will know it was me when my disappearance becomes known,” Jason pointed out and Richard shrugged.

“So they’ll know. It will still be at least a day before they think to ask after us at the gate.” He sent Jason a sly look. “You have fallen into the habit of avoiding people, sir.”

Jason said nothing more, just tugged the scarf up so it draped over the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones, leaving only his eyes showing. He would not be a prince, just one half of a merchant pair trying to get an early start to a busy day. And indeed, the guards at the outer gate barely spared them a glance and a wave, their concern being the people trying to get in, not out.

And then they were out of the citadel, Jason’s first excursion beyond the walls since before Ra’s’ death. The moon was a scythe in the sky, shining its sparse light across the rocky ground and throwing the world into shadows. The camels settled into their own pace, Richard not hurrying them along and Jason not daring to try. Richard merely tipped his head back, as if breathing in the moonlight. 

Jason, for his part, twisted in the saddle as best he dared and looked back at the citadel. It would be grand sight in the daylight but at night the canyon walls cast it into shadow, a dark well that looked endlessly deep and sinister. He turned away again, looking instead at the road ahead. He felt vaguely as though he should take the lead- but there was only one road, only one way to go.

He touched his fingers to his sword, then settled into the saddle as best he could. They had a long way to go.

* * *

Daylight brought baking heat and relentless sunlight shining directly into the canyon, lighting up the cliff they were pacing and picking out the thin bands of subtly different shades of red and yellow in the rock face. Jason, who had lived his recent years in the shadows of the citadel’s walls, squinted unhappily and turned his face to stare down at his camel’s neck, the only thing that didn’t reflect the sunlight back at him bright and hot. It would get better when they moved away from the canyon wall, but there was a ways to go yet.

They rode throughout the day, hardly stopping for anything. They did pass a few signs of people- tent stakes dug into hard-packed dirt, ruts from countless wheels carved into the surface of the road- and even a handful of people heading towards the citadel on foot, leading pack-laden donkeys on tethers. Jason went tense and wary the first few times he looked up to see the shadow of a traveler approaching, but they kept to their side of the road and barely spared a glance as they passed.

It was a long and empty trip, with not much to do but watch the camel’s neck sway and count the bruises as they pressed slow but steady into his skin, not much to think about except- that which Jason was _absolutely not_ thinking about. He tried to remember his first trip to Nanda Parbat instead, when he was still small enough to be seated before Talia as they rode in on a long-legged desert horse, no camels for the princess. He still had no idea what had drawn Talia out of the desert and into the wet grey lands of the north, but he was grateful for it- she had taken him off the streets, rescued him from the life of careless cruelty that was all an orphan could expect in those lands, and brought him here and made him prince- until she snatched it away again. And now he was right back at the things he was not thinking about.

He considered, briefly, pushing the issue that he should be leading- it was his journey, after all, the guardsman had not been invited and deserved no kindnesses for forcing himself into it. He had plotted it all out himself, had drawn a rough map, had read up on the creatures it could be. But the one time he tried applying pressure to the camel’s sides, a _hurry-up_ signal when riding anything else, it _myegh_ ed at him and walked even slower. He let it go after that, since Richard seemed to know where he was going, and since no good ever came from arguing with a camel.

Sunset was short, cut off abruptly as the sun sank beyond the canyon wall, and they were well into the night before Richard finally turned his camel off the road and stopped without even consulting Jason, bedding down until sunrise, just long enough for the aches and stiffness of riding a camel to really settle into Jason’s bones and leave him feeling like a statue instead of a man. Sleep was elusive and restless.

Then the sun rose, and they were on their way again.

* * *

He heard it, smelled it, long before he saw it- a distant rumble, like the purr of a contented cat, and the slick smell of wet stone and fresh earth. The breeze changed direction, became steady and cool; as they approached he could feel it, a fine mist blowing against the outer layer of his robes and dampening the fabric. He stopped his camel at the summit of the shallow hill that looked down onto the city below and pulled the scarf down and breathed it in, feeling the heavy wet air settle in his lungs.

“Before we go in,” Richard said, coming up to stand his camel beside Jason’s, staring at the spectacle before them. “Are we trying not to be obvious, sir?”

Jason turned that one over in his mind for a few minutes before he realized what that meant. “I would rather people not know who I am, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

Richard nodded. “You will be treated differently,” he said, carefully blank, and Jason snorted impatiently.

“I wasn’t born royal, Richard,” he pointed out.

“Dick,” the man replied instantly, and grinned when Jason shot him a sharp look. “My name. I prefer it to Richard.”

Jason looked away from him, down at the city beyond. The river that had once carved out the canyon had twisted and turned and snaked its way across rocky desert, abandoning the canyon for eons before abruptly doubling back and returning to the canyon a mere century ago. It thundered now in a dramatic tumble over the canyon’s western wall, the water scattered by wind and sun-heat and landing mostly in a heavy mist on the ground below. The city had grown up around it, a carpet of green cut across by channels and ducts meant to spread the water’s reach, surrounded by buildings and marketplaces and walls almost as tall as the citadel of Nanda Parbat’s.

Hyador, the city of water, the brightest jewel in the kingdom of Nanda Parbat. Jason had seen it once before, had stood within its walls, stood under the heavy mists as the river blew away around him, when Talia had first brought him home with her. He had not understood deserts then, had not realized how precious a city like Hyador was in a dry waste like this. He looked at it now, and felt his skin itch dryly with sunburn and his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth with thirst.

“Do we have the papers to get into the city?” he asked. He had seen how long it took travelers to get into the citadel, and all that was kept there was the royal family, nothing so valuable as _water_.

“No,” Richard- _Dick_ \- said, and pointed. “We’re not going into the city. We’re going there.” 

_There_ was a long meandering wall of loose-stacked rocks that curved along the upper bank of the long-extinct river that had carved out the canyon. Sheltered in the shadow of the wall was another city, this far less grand. It was a collection of brick-walled buildings surrounded by tents and scattered campfires, built up big enough to burn visibly even in bright daylight. And, strangely, another wall ran on the other side of in, long rolls of linen in vertical frames off the ground, standing between the two cities as if to block out sight of each other.

“A nomad camp,” he said in surprised recognition. He slid a glance over at Dick and caught the tail end of a grimace, and swallowed his next words.

_Romani_ , the nomad had called him, and Dick had been unhappy to hear it- or, perhaps, to have Jason hear it. Jason had not sought any sort of clarification on that, not when the monster in the desert took up so much of his attention, but he remembered all the same.

“Travelers,” Dick corrected. He was not looking at Jason, but there was weight in his tone, a challenge, a test. “I don’t know their tribe name, so they’re just Travelers.”

“Travelers,” Jason echoed carefully. “You’ve brought us here to seek their help?”

Dick shrugged. He was a good actor- Jason hardly noticed the tension easing out of the tight line of his shoulders at Jason’s easy acquiesence, the corner of his lips ticking upwards. “They know where it is.”

“It burned out a village not a week ago,” Jason protested- but continued even as Dick drew breath to correct him again. “But that is only where it has _been_ , not where it is now.”

“Exactly,” Dick said. “If I had a fire-breathing, man-eating monster roaming around _my_ territory, I would be keeping very close track of it.”

Jason looked again at the glory of Hyador, then back at the tent city near the wall. He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “Then what are we waiting for?”

* * *

Up close and personal, the glory of Hyador really wasn’t so glorious. The tall walls blocked the beauty of the city and the waterfall from view, and the ground was slick and mossy and the smell of mold pervaded the air. Jason was honestly glad to turn away from it, to head towards the tents, where the breeze was damp but the air was dry and smelled of desert dust.

Dick took the lead back, and spared several nervous glances back to Jason as he led them towards the tent city. He changed when they got close, sat looser in the saddle and smiled, and Jason wondered at the life he had lived and the training he had received, that he lied with his body so easily, that he even felt the need to do so. Still, it served their purpose for the time being, so he let it go.

The people of the tent city were not all nomads- Travelers. Most of them actually looked like the people of Nanda Parbat, faces clean of ink, clothing styles similar to the peasant garb of the citadel. They were polite but busy, only responding to the newcomers when Dick greeted them first. In turn, he led them quickly and expertly through the busy crowd, only stopping to ask directions. They headed towards the cloth panels Jason had noticed earlier until they were suddenly passing through a strange, empty alley where there were no tents, no people, hardly even any footprints in the dirt.

And then they were across to the other side, in the Travelers’ camp.

The difference was immediate- the Travelers’ camp was further out from the wall and did not enjoy the shade as the rest of the tent city did, and as a result was quiet and still as its inhabitants sought shelter from the midday heat. A man sat at the edge of the barrier alley, sedately smoking from a long wooden pipe that had probably traveled farther to reach Nanda Parbat than Jason had. There were sweeps of dark blue across his cheekbones, highlighting the unusual green color of his eyes, and he wore a leather thong studded with sharp teeth from various meat-eaters tied around his neck. He moved the pipe stem from his lips and called out a question, a single word in a harsh raven’s caw of a voice.

Dick answered, speaking a language Jason had never even heard before, let alone had any chance of understanding. He listened closely, trying to parse out any familiar words, listening for his name or Talia’s or Nanda Parbat- it had occurred to him that this would be a perfect way to dispose of an unwanted prince, send him off after a monster with the pretty-faced guardsman he had unsubtly lusted after for years to lead him astray. He didn’t think Dick would be part of any of that, but then Dick was a very good actor, good enough that Jason saw the masks for what they were only when he watched Dick switch between them.

The guard- for surely that was what he was, watching the border for trespassers and troublemakers- considered Dick with obvious suspicion, clearly surprised to find a kingdom boy who could speak his language. He said something slow and measured, and Dick responded, and he snorted and shrugged- obviously dismissing it as not his problem- and said something and pointed behind him, and Dick nudged his camel into motion without another word. Jason mimicked his motion exactly and his camel sighed and groaned and eventually ambled off after the other one, leaving its rider fuming.

Dick pulled back, letting Jason catch up to him. “There’s a caravan leaving tonight that will take us halfway to where we need to go,” he said quietly, eyes flicking over the camp around them. He was watchful but not tense, unhappy to be here but clearly not itching to leave. Jason thought _Romani_ again, and wondered if he should have asked when he had the chance.

Instead, still stinging with irritation at the camel and the mere possibility of Dick’s betrayal, he said, “So should I just never speak to them, or am I actually allowed to participate in my own quest?”

“If you learn the language between now and when we have to speak to someone next, you’re more than welcome to,” Dick said, tone remarkably even for the eyeroll that accompanied the words. It was a shock, until Jason remembered- he was not a prince. Not now, not here.

“Do any of them even speak my language?” he asked in annoyed despair.

“Oh, most of them, probably,” Dick said easily. “But _can they_ isn’t the question, it’s _will they_.”

Jason grunted in irritation, feeling his control over the situation slipping away again, further than ever. He turned away, nudging his camel back into motion, and Dick must have sensed something of his mood, for he stayed back.

“The messenger who brought us the news at the citadel isn’t part of this clan,” he said, voice pitched low as they moved down a narrow path cluttered on either side with tents. “No one here should recognize you.”

It was as good a permission as Jason was likely to get, so he pulled down the face scarf. His skin burned easily, and freckles had bloomed across the bridge of his nose and along the nape of his neck, but all people of the citadel ran pale. It would be easy enough to explain himself away as Dick’s fellow guardsman, sent by the queen to investigate the monster in the desert. Assuming, of course, that the Travelers deigned to speak with him at all.

And then the path opened out on one side, walled in by the fabric panels Jason had seen. Up close and personal, he could see that they were not linen but something looser, almost a tight mesh instead of a proper fabric. And they were wet, mist from the waterfall clinging to the mesh, and he suddenly understood- they were collecting the water on the breeze. Judging by the steady trickle of water coming off the bottom of the mesh panels and feeding into the complicated troughs at the bottom, covered to prevent evaporation, it was a fairly efficient system.

Jason reached out, unthinking, and was surprised when a strong grip clamped around his wrist, tight enough to bruise, to grind bones together. He looked down into a weathered face nearly black with the intricate scrawl of marks, one eye bright bronze-brown and one milky grey and blind.

He said something in the language Dick and the guard had used and Jason blinked down at him, then, unable to stop himself, spared a glance back at Dick, who was still and tense but said nothing. The man spoke again, then sighed and rolled his eyes and said, slowly but clearly, “We do not touch.”

“Sorry,” Jason said, and tried to twist his wrist free. Instead of releasing him, the man looked back and forth between them.

“You are from the city,” he said, and gestured north, towards the citadel itself instead of Hyador.

“We heard about something living in the desert,” Jason said, and twisted and pulled sharply, yanking his hand free. “We’re here to see what it is, and what may be done about it.”

That was Dick’s cue to step in and explain in better detail, but he had apparently taken Jason’s complaint to heart, and kept quiet. The Traveler standing at Jason’s side smiled grimly and looked between them again.

“Ah,” he said. “And we leave tonight, and travel the western road.”

A woman said something from Jason’s other side, and he looked around and realized that they had attracted a small crowd, people approaching from tents and shadows to gather loosely around them. The camel shifted under Jason, sensing his sudden tension and bracing itself, ears pivoting as the crowd chuckled at the woman’s words. Jason looked back in time to see Dick’s mouth snap shut, whatever rebuttal he had been about to give bitten back. He was pretending not to understand, Jason realized, forcing the Travelers to speak the language of Nanda Parbat if they wanted to communicate at all.

“She said you will die out there,” the man said to Jason, still chuckling to himself, as though it were tremendously funny.

“That’s our problem,” Jason said, and the man’s smile fell and he stared up at Jason intently. He was not as old as his scars and marks suggested, Jason realized, perhaps a decade or so older than Jason himself. Whatever he saw in Jason’s face made him smile again, different than before. He stepped back and called out a single word, and the crowd dispersed with the haste of children whose taskmaster had walked in to find them playing games instead of doing chores. He looked back at Jason again.

“We’ll take you,” he said. “We won’t help you, if something goes wrong. We are not in the habit of crossing paths with monsters.”

Jason opened his mouth to say _I know, you came to us to do it for you_ \- but Dick said, quiet and low, “Jay,” in warning, and Jason shut his mouth again.

“And you’ll earn your keep while you’re with us,” the man added, graciously ignoring that little aside. “The long road makes for a hard life, little boys, not that softness you’re used to behind the walls of your precious citadel.”

He was fishing for a reaction, hoping to stir them up and piss them off. Jason set his jaw and swallowed down the automatic protest, refusing to give him what he wanted, and the man eventually smiled again, looking almost impressed.

“You might actually survive long enough to die on the teeth of that beast,” he said, and turned away before Jason could figure out how to respond to that one. “Come along, boys,” he called as he walked away.

Jason glanced back at Dick again, got a shrug and a _go ahead_ gesture, and turned back and nudged his camel back into motion and followed the man.

* * *

He called himself Kefa, which Jason suspected, and Dick confirmed, was a title and not a proper name. He was of high standing in the Traveler hierarchy, in command of the caravan that was setting out. He put them under the command of a child of about ten, who was clearly delighted at the opportunity to boss around a pair of grown men, and who set them to work at sorting and packing and loading and hauling and tying and untying until Jason’s muscles burned and his fingertips were bloody from the rough rope and his head was throbbing from too much sunlight and not enough water.

Dick called it quits eventually, telling their miniature overlord that they were taking a break and ordering him to fetch them water and food in a tone the child did not dare contradict, although he appeared unhappy at the sudden reversal of authority. Jason took the waterskin offered him and drank it in the shade of the water sieves, watching the Travelers work slowly and steadily under the heat of the midday sun.

He watched and waited, until suddenly he could not wait anymore. Then he turned to Dick sitting beside him and said, “Romani?”

Dick bit into a piece of jerky and said nothing at first, blue eyes unfocused and tracking movement by instinct. “My people,” he said finally. “Travelers, like them, only we travel the lands to the north, mountains and forests, not deserts.” Another bite of jerky, a long moment of consideration. “My mother told me the forest people are cousins to the desert people, that we still meet up at some grand party and trade stories and goods and cross bloodlines, so we all still speak the same language, or close enough.”

He definitely looked related to them, Jason thought. Aside from those shocking eyes, Dick looked more like he belonged here, in the desert in general and Nanda Parbat in specific, than Jason himself. “You didn’t want them to know?” he asked.

“My parents died when I was young, and I had to leave my tribe. I was raised by an outsider who knew basically nothing of our culture. When they call me _Romani_ , it feels like an insult.” Dick did not look at him, focusing instead on folding the last bit of jerky over on itself, looking almost uncertain. Jason sat in silence, considering it, slowly realizing that Dick had said more to Jason in the last five minutes than he had in the last year. He did not seem to be a reserved man by nature- Jason had seen him with the others guards, had heard him with them while they laughed and bragged and gossiped- but it seemed every time he was around Jason, he was biting back his words. It was not a pleasant realization.

“I was born in the slums of a northern city,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. For all that he wore his foreignness on his too-pale face, in his blue-green eyes, he hated admitting that he had had a life before Nanda Parbat. “I remember it rained all the time.” He snapped his mouth shut on the next sentence, feeling the words _my mother_ on his tongue and swallowing them down. Finally he said, “Talia caught me trying to steal her horse and decided to take me back to Nanda Parbat with her.” He had never asked why, why she was there, why she had taken pity on him when she had killed her own sister in cold blood. He wondered if she thought now that it had been a mistake.

Thinking of Talia left a sour taste in his mouth. He washed it down with another gulp of water and pushed himself up off the ground. “How long will we be with them?” he asked, jerking his chin to indicate the Kefa as he strode busily past.

“Two days, maybe three,” Dick said as he stood as well. “It depends on how they go. Normally they travel at night and camp during the day, but there’s no good place to make camp out on the western road, so they might try to push through.”

They had packed up tents, Jason had folded some of them up himself. But he didn’t know where they were going after they parted ways. He nodded and looked away, to the west and the sun sinking towards the canyon wall. They were to leave soon, and when they did, Jason would effectively be away from the kingdom. He was no longer a prince, just a man with a mission.

“Then we had best get ready,” he said, half-nonsensically, responding mostly to his own thoughts. Dick frowned but nodded, following his lead.

Jason set off to find their miniature overlord, and got back to work.

* * *

The road was long, and the ride hard. Jason had thought their way here was rough- but Dick was kind, compared to the Travelers, who after all lived their entire lives from the saddle.

The road went south and then turned west when the canyon wall finally retreated into rocky ledges, and there was nothing before them but an endless waste. The river that fed Hyador flowed from the north, and they turned west instead, soon leaving its sliver of green behind, swallowed up by a land of red stone. Eventually even the stone faded, leaving only packed dirt and the beginnings of yellow sand, gathered in the depressions in the ground, the cracks in the dirt, the leeward shadows of rocky outcroppings.

The desert around the citadel was still alive, despite being a desert. When dawn came the first day, Jason saw no hawks on the wing, no reptiles sunning themselves before it got too hot, no small darting rodents taking to shelter, no scrubby plants clinging stubbornly to life. When Jason looked up, the horizon was distant and shimmering already with heat-haze, and there was nothing but dirt and sand as far as he could see.

The edge of the western desert that kept Nanda Parbat so well-guarded, a sea of sand, a far greater barrier than Jason had realized until he laid eyes on it. He tried to imagine what sort of creature could cross that, and shivered.

An hour after dawn, an elderly woman who rode her camel better than Jason rode a horse came up to him, holding out a crockery pot with an ointment in it. She said something and gestured with the crock, and when Jason shook his head in incomprehension, she gestured again, dipping her hand towards the crock and then bringing it back towards her face.

“She says to rub that ointment on whatever skin sees sunlight, to prevent it burning,” Dick called up from behind Jason. Apparently he was done pretending not to speak the language.

“We aren’t stopping today,” Jason half-asked, and Dick addressed the woman for a moment, and listened when she answered.

“Not until sunset,” he translated, and Jason sighed and dipped his fingers into the ointment. The old woman stayed to make sure he applied it correctly, then fell back to offer the ointment to Dick, then rode away.

Jason looked ahead, where the first gentle slopes of sandy dunes could be seen in the very distance. They would turn north eventually. When they turned, he and Dick would keep riding straight out.

It wasn’t so long a ride, he told himself, and not such a miserable ordeal. He was stiff and sore from the saddle but he was learning how to relax his spine, how to let his body roll with the camel’s jolting gait. He would still much rather have a horse, but he no longer actively hated the camel. And there was plenty to look at- the silent harsh beauty of the desert, striped rock laying in jagged crags, the sweep of yellow sand in shallow dunes that tricked the eye and seemed to swell and recede like waves on the surface of the ocean. 

He watched the desert, he watched the sky, he watched the Travelers- he was stuck in limbo, waiting for something to change, imagining the hours of the day stretching out and melting in the heat, the day unending as they marched ever onward. He closed his eyes so he would not keep looking up to measure the sun’s progress, and tried not to imagine three more days of this. He would go mad long before they got anywhere.

And still they marched ever onward, as the desert closed in around them and swallowed them up.

* * *

The Travelers called a halt in the weird hour after sunset, when the air was thinking about cooling off for the evening and the sand had been out of direct sunlight long enough not to burn bare skin anymore. They lit torches and bonfires and worked around them, setting up camp with a practiced familiarity. Jason and Dick mostly just served to be underfoot, although that did not stop people from ordering them around. They helped set up tents and staked lines for the camels and passed out rations to the Travelers, and by the time they were done, it was proper night and everyone was gathered around the fires.

Dick hesitated, clearly uncertain, so Jason picked a fire with a smaller group of people around it and settled down in one of the gaps. There was some staring, some whispering- but then the old woman who had given them the ointment earlier smiled at them, showing off startlingly white teeth, and passed over a bowl of something thick and soupy.

“No, thank you,” Jason said, waving it away, but Dick took it and drank some, all but chewing on it to get it down.

“Cactus juice,” he said when Jason looked at him for explanation, and offered him the bowl again. Reluctantly, feeling every person at their fire watching him expectantly, Jason took the bowl and took a delicate sip. It was every bit as disgusting as he had thought and more, slimy and chunky and clinging grossly to his tongue and throat, and he choked and coughed and had to hand the bowl off quickly before he spilled it.

One of the Travelers said something, and the others chuckled. Jason looked up at him and he grinned and said, “City boy.”

“He is,” Dick agreed cheerfully, and the man turned to look at him with a different expression, something between fear and awe.

“And you-” he said, and said something else, and Dick went very, very still for a heartbeat or two. Then he shrugged and laughed, and it was all so fake, so much like the masks he wore at the citadel.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said easily. “That man doesn’t even exist.”

“He does,” the man insisted. “I met him.”

Dick smiled softly and shook his head, like the other man was being unreasonable and there was nothing to be done for it. Jason looked back and forth between them and said “What? What man?”

“The dark man,” the Traveler said, his tone far too simple and matter-of-fact for such absurd words. Jason looked over at Dick, who was passing the bowl back to the old woman, all of his attention focused on the task.

“Who is the dark man?” Jason asked, since it was clear he was meant to. The Traveler nodded to himself and settled into his spot more firmly.

“A legend, told to make poor people feel better,” Dick said.

“A real man,” the Traveler countered. “He travels to all the great cities, and fights evil where he finds it. They say he is a demon of darkness who turned to good, and uses his powers to destroy his own kind.”

“A man or a demon, he can’t be both,” Dick said impatiently. Jason glanced at him, and Dick seemed to realize his protests were suspicious, for he snapped his mouth shut and lowered his head and said nothing more.

“He had a boy with him for a while,” the Traveler continued, “a boy who grew into a fine young man. They say the boy was the dark man’s better at most things, and the dark man grew jealous and chased him away for it. No one has seen the boy in almost four years.” The bowl had made it around to him, and he took a long slurping drink of it.

“I met the dark man once,” he added. “Him and his boy, when he was still just a runt. I told your boy here that he reminded me of him.” And Dick had protested, fought too hard, and now everyone there was looking at him with knowing eyes. At least they seemed to respect him for it, instead of fear or hate him.

“He saved the village my clan was camped near,” the Traveler continued. “There was a magistrate bleeding them dry. And then the dark man came, him and his boy, and when they left three days later, the magistrate was in a cell and the village was free again. That’s what he does.” He leaned forward, emphasizing his words, speaking mostly to Dick. “He saves people, and he doesn’t need to kill someone to do it. _That’s_ why he’s a legend.”

Jason glanced over again, but Dick had mastered himself by that point, and only looked politely interested in the man’s story. “He sounds impressive,” he agreed passively, and stood. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I should turn in early.”

They watched him leave, all sitting in silence, Jason feeling alone and awkward. These were not his people, he did not know how to talk to them- most of them didn’t even speak his language. Still, when he looked over, the man who had been speaking looked more amused than anything else.

“I must have been mistaken,” he said, and shared a knowing glance with the people closest to him.

The bowl of cactus juice had made it around to Jason again, and he couldn’t refuse another sip with all of them staring at him. He choked down a mouthful of it, then passed the bowl on and stood himself.

“I should get some sleep too,” he said.

“Good luck, city boy,” the speaker said, and gave him a grave nod. “May you both survive.”

Jason did not know what to say to that, so he nodded in return and turned away, heading over to their camp site, and tried very hard not to think about what the next few days might bring.

* * *

They slept under the stars that night, no tent for them- the Travelers had accounted for their own needs and nothing more. The camels had settled down nearby and served as a convenient windbreak, for the breeze was hot and carried fine sand like the river’s mist at Hyador, only this mist scoured and scraped bare skin raw and caked into clothing folds and had to be shaken out periodically. The camels thought nothing of it, protected as they were by their woolly coats, but Jason draped a blanket across his back and turned against the wind, head and shoulders covered, trying to ignore the heat.

“Why did you come to Nanda Parbat?” he asked finally, since it was clear enough that he would not be sleeping anytime soon. He looked over at Dick sitting with his back to the wind, eyes fixed on one of the fires. They had fed it a special fuel to make it burn bright and long but not overly hot, and they would burn for hours yet.

“A favor for a friend,” he said quietly, and looked down at Jason, who sat up as well. He moved closer, close enough that their knees jostled, and he did not move away.

“The dark man?” he asked, and Dick snorted.

“You shouldn’t believe rumors,” he said.

“That’s not a no,” Jason pointed out.

Dick was silent for a while. Then he shifted upwards onto one knee, looking around, then settled back down.

“To me he was just Bruce,” he said quietly. “Just a man who did what needed to be done when he met someone doing wrong. I didn’t realize what we were doing was remarkable in any way. I didn’t even know what people called him until the first time I came to this land, almost four years ago now. I didn’t know what stories they told about him.”

“You were raised by the dark man, then,” Jason said, and Dick shrugged and nodded. “So how did you end up here?”

“We argued,” he said. “That’s all we do anymore, it seems. We argued, and I left, and I came here because.” He shook his head and spread his fingers into the sand at his feet, tracing arcane patterns into it. “Because I knew he wouldn’t come here himself, I guess.”

Jason absorbed this in silence. He looked over at Dick, close enough to touch, and felt the need to- do something. He seemed sad and a little lost, and Jason wanted to soothe him somehow.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the only thing he could truly offer, and Dick smiled a fake smile and shrugged again.

“It’s all right,” he said carelessly, like he wasn’t lying through his teeth. “I like to complain about his being an overbearing ass, but really, what my life would have been like without Bruce doesn’t bear imagining.”

Jason almost asked- but then he thought about it, those northern cities with their greed and corruption, and a freshly orphaned Romani boy with no friends or family. He must have been an absolutely beautiful child, a thought that made Jason feel sick just thinking it.

The al Ghuls were brutal and bloody, but Talia, and Ra’s before he went mad, tolerated no such aberrations. Jason thought he would rather live in a land with a king prone to executing without question those who did such great wrongs than in a land with a king who offered mercy to all.

“Is that why Talia doesn’t like you? Because of Bruce?” he asked, and Dick made a strange noise, like a dark laugh bitten back.

“That’s part of it, yes,” he agreed. “She also thinks I’m here to take something from her, something she values greatly.”

“Are you?”Jason asked.

“No,” Dick said simply, and looked down at the sand again. He had drawn a strange symbol, long curves and sharp points, a winged creature. He swept his hand across it and wiped it away. “I don’t care for her or her style of ruling, but even I have to admit, Talia is good for Nanda Parbat. I wouldn’t want to do anything to disrupt that.”

“I’m not going to get an answer out of you, am I,” Jason said mildly. “I could order you to tell me.”

“You could,” Dick agreed. “And I would lie, and keep lying until I came up with one you liked enough to believe. I gave my word not to tell anyone, not even the prince, and I intend to keep it.”

“Gave your word to who? Your dark man?”

“Talia,” Dick said, and Jason bit his tongue to keep his surprise down.

He looked at Dick again, looked at him anew, tried to piece all that he had just learned into place. Then he turned forward again and leaned just a little, until their shoulders brushed and Jason could feel the steady rise and fall of Dick’s chest as he breathed.

“You seem different here,” he said, surprising himself with the observation.

“I like it out here,” Dick agreed. “I like the sky, not the walls.”

It wasn’t just that- he seemed more relaxed, less on-guard- he seemed more real, Jason decided, as if he had decided to leave the masks in Nanda Parbat and was risking showing his true self, a little more sharp-edged , a little less obedient. Jason looked away to the star-studded sky, and felt something soft- almost fondness, but deeper, richer- blooming in his chest. He liked the real Dick, he decided.

“We should get some sleep,” he said. He didn’t know when they were going to break off from the Travelers, if they were going to stop again before then. Best to rest now, while they still had the entire caravan around them, and the threat of the creature in the desert was still far away.

“We should,” Dick agreed, and reached over to clap a hand on Jason’s shoulder, something he would not have dared to do back in Nanda Parbat. “Good night, Jason,” he added, and that soft feeling grew even softer, and Jason felt heat rise inexplicably to his cheeks.

He cleared his throat and laid back down, pulling the blanket back up and listening to the barely-there patter of wind-driven sand against it. “Good night, then,” he said gruffly, and couldn’t help but spare a worried glance to be sure he hadn’t caused offense with his coarseness- but Dick was smiling, so Jason turned away again.

Sleep came easy after that.


	3. Chapter 3

At noon the third day, the caravan pulled up to a halt.

Jason sat ready in the saddle, fingers on the hilt of his sword just in case- most of the Travelers looked unconcerned, but it had not escaped his notice that all the while they were riding, and for the entirety of the night they had camped, there were sentries posted between the main body of the caravan and the desert, faces turned outward and eyes watchful. There were more things living in the sands than just the monster Jason hunted, it seemed.

“We turn north here,” the Kefa’s voice said suddenly, and Jason turned away and found the man had approached along the inside. He waited until he was sure he had Jason’s attention before continuing. “This is where we part ways.”

“Where do we go from here?” Jason asked. 

“If you follow this line straight west,” the Kefa said, pointing helpfully, “in two days’ time you’ll come across a great stone outcropping. The way station the creature attacked will be close enough to be seen. You’ll need to find the creature on your own from there.”

Jason looked back at Dick, who was looking due west, as if to memorize the horizon so he would know where to go. “What happens if we stray from the line and get lost?” Jason asked. He already knew the answer, but-

“Then you die,” the Kefa said easily. “We will not come back for you, no matter what happens.”

Jason looked at Dick again, this time waiting for the other man to respond. He would not, _could not_ , make this choice for him.

Except he already had, by refusing to turn away himself. Dick looked at him and nodded once, and Jason turned back to the Kefa.

“Thank you for your assistance,” he said, every inch the formal prince greeting an equal in rank, and the Kefa blinked in mute surprise.

“Here,” he said, “we have prepared-” and he gestured, and another rider brought forward two bundles. Extra food rations, and a hip-flask of water, and a small crock of the sun ointment the old woman liked to give them. Jason took his with a murmured thanks, tucking the hip-flask into his belt already.

“Good luck,” the Kefa said last, and turned away, the caravan following him, flowing like water around Jason and Dick. They went without a single backwards glance, no doubt already putting out of their minds the two strangers who were sure to die.

Jason waited until they were alone, until all that was left of the caravan was the sound of camels grunting and braying. Then he looked at Dick again.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Due west,” Dick said, and pointed ahead, and Jason nudged his camel into motion and followed the line into the heart of the desert.

* * *

For all that Jason had known Nanda Parbat was a desert kingdom, he hadn’t truly known it, not until he set out to cross the desert itself.

They fell into line, Dick in front because he knew the way and Jason was not ashamed to yield the lead to a child of wanderers, and because Jason needed something to focus on that wasn’t the lack of any discernible trail. They headed over the gently sloping dunes at first, then around them when they got taller and the sand was too deep, too soft. Jason turned back once to make sure they were still going in the proper direction and stared at the trail of camel prints, curving and weaving in the lower tracks around the dunes, and had to turn back. He trusted Dick to lead them right, he did- he had to, by now.

The dunes grew tall around them, some above Jason’s head even when he was seated on the camel. The view around them narrowed down to what they could see around the flanks of the dunes, and Dick stopped often to check the angle of the sun and their direction. 

He called a halt when the sun drifted too far to the horizon for him to see it properly, and they bedded down for the night in the shallow track between two tall dunes. They did not light a fire and share stories, but instead pressed close together in silence. The desert was silent, save for the occasional sigh of sand shifting when the breeze stirred, and there was nothing to see but the stars wheeling high overhead. Even the moon did not show itself, its current track too low to the horizon to be seen around the dunes, although it did paint the desert silver with its light.

Nothing stirred, nothing breathed. Even the camels remained still. Jason took first watch and ordered Dick to sleep and pressed close against him when he finally drifted off, feeling him breath, using it as an anchor to keep him here and now, lest he spin off into some timeless void of stars and sand.

Then he opened his eyes, and Dick was kneeling over him and telling him it was time to move out, the sun was rising and they needed to make the most of the daylight.

Evening the second day brought them to the burned land.

It started dramatically, a great sweep of glass that climbed up the side of the dune with dramatic spikes thrust into the air. It was foggy and yellow, but it glittered in the dying sunlight like glass fit for a mirror. Jason dared to touch it and found it hot with sunlight and smooth as well-worn stone.

“We found it,” Jason said quietly, looking at the glass. The arch of it was twice as long as he was tall, and the spikes were half his height. He tried to imagine the size of the creature necessary to create this, the sort of heat it could produce, and turned away.

They were not here to fight it, he reminded himself. Just to see it, observe it, figure out what it was and decide what to do about it.

“We found its territory,” Dick corrected grimly. “We’re probably close to the way station. We should try to find it before it gets too dark.”

“Right,” Jason agreed, and pulled his camel away from the dune and the glass and followed as Dick set off again.

* * *

The waystation was a scattered handful of stone huts. They stood on a shelf of rock that rose up out of the sand suddenly, culminating in a dramatic peak that soared high overhead, like some indescribably vast sheet of stone far underground had twisted upwards and jutted a corner out into the air. The walls of the huts were scorched black, the roofs- hay or cloth or shingled clay tiles, Jason couldn’t tell- melted or burned away, but the huts themselves still stood and seemed fairly sound. Whatever this creature was, it could not melt stone.

It seemed to have tried, though- the sandy stretch leading up to the rock was all blasted and melted and deeply scored, as if a massive creature with massive claws had ripped at it in frustration.

“There are no bodies,” Dick said, almost as if to himself, and Jason looked away from the glassy slag at the rock’s edge and over at him. He was looking through open doorways into the huts, then went around the far side of one of the huts- then swore, startled. Jason was already kicking his camel into a knock-kneed run when Dick yelled his name, and he came around the corner to find-

A sword, and blood and soot smeared across the rock in such a way as if a burned and mangled body were dragged away, sword fallen from nerveless fingers. The blade was etched near the hilt with the insignia of the kingdom of Nanda Parbat.

“My scout,” Jason said with a tired sigh. He had expected as much when the man had failed to return, but it stung nonetheless.

Dick dismounted and turned the camel’s head so it wandered in amongst the huts. “It looks like he was trying to make for this trail,” he said, indicating a path that wound its way up the side of the rocky outcropping. It was not especially narrow, but it cut back on itself many times, and the rock seemed worn and unsteady underfoot- a horse might make it if it was mindful of its footing, but a camel almost certainly would not. Jason got down and left his own camel to do as it would and followed when Dick led the way up the trail.

They had gone just far enough that Jason was about to call a halt and head back down- why would there even be a path up here?- when Dick went totally still, then darted forward. Jason muttered a dark complaint but followed again, then stopped a few steps later where Dick had.

Scratched into the side of the rocky outcropping was a shallow niche, a cupola big enough for a man to stand with his head down and deep enough for two people to seek shelter from the sunlight-

-and trickling into the depression, flowing through the rocks, was a tiny ribbon of water.

Dick cupped his hands in the water and dared a sip, then looked over at Jason. “It tastes clean,” he said, shaking his hands dry.

“Where did it come from?” Jason asked, coming over to take a sip for himself.

“Underground,” Dick said, brushing his fingers across the precious stream of water and getting just the very tips wet. It spilled onto the rock at their feet, seeping back into the stone from hence it came through cracks and crevices. “I’ve heard about this. The ground shifts and cracks, and these great spears of rock thrust up above the sands and bleed water for months or even years afterwards. The Travelers keep them secret.” He looked up at Jason, looked him in the eye. “They must be very scared of this creature, to give this up.”

Jason looked away, at the desert beyond the rocky shelf. They were high enough up that he had a decent view of a sea of sand and dunes, and the glass that shone with the last gasps of sunlight as night settled in. The burned land stretched as far as the eye could see.

“They probably should be,” Jason said, and started to say something else-

There was a noise, a shuffling as a large body approached, a loud snort. Jason spun on his heel, drawing his sword, bracing himself for the creature as it approached, coming down the trail as it continued up the side of the outcropping.

And then it appeared, and Jason relaxed, and even gave a disbelieving little laugh, as the scout’s horse looked at them and whinnied in greeting.

“You survived,” Jason said in surprise as the horse trotted over, clearly pleased at finding some other living thing in this glassy sandy waste, and pushed at him with its nose. He scratched under the strap of the headstall and said, “How badly is it hurt?”

“Singed in the tail,” Dick reported. “But other than that, it’s fine. It’s even got its saddle still.” And the reins, burned and broken and dangling from its bit, but still enough left to tie a knot and have good length. Dick dug into the saddle pack and produce some grain, which the horse happily munched on mixed with a bit of spring water.

Jason could easily imagine it- the scout riding desperately for the trail, too narrow for the creature to follow him up, and the horse getting scared and rearing back- throwing its rider- leaving him to die while it fled to safety. Not the horse’s fault, of course. He patted it on the neck and moved away, over to where Dick was sitting near the spring.

“We’ll ride out tomorrow morning on the camels, see what we can see,” he said. 

“That is a bad idea,” Dick said. “ _This_ is a bad idea. We should leave now.”

“You didn’t have to come with,” Jason snapped, irritated- to have come so far, and back out now? Did Dick think him a coward?

“Jason,” Dick said, then gentled his tone, calm but still urgent. “They didn’t tell this part of the story the other night, but Bruce hunts monsters as well as evil men. Believe me when I say this thing is one of the nastiest creatures I’ve heard of. We should leave now, and come back with proper reinforcements.”

“I didn’t come all this way to run back home the second it got a little dangerous,” Jason said.

“You’re not going to prove anything by getting yourself killed,” Dick argued.

“I’m not here to prove myself to you,” Jason snapped.

“Then who are you trying to prove yourself to?” Dick asked in exasperated despair. “Because they aren’t here, so unless you-” And he stopped dead, and stared, and Jason felt his stomach sink.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Jason-”

“I said no.”

“-just because you’re not crown prince anymore doesn’t mean-”

“I said no!” Jason yelled, and his voice echoed off the rock, and Dick went pale and snapped his mouth shut. “I don’t need _anybody’s_ approval, I just- I need-” He made an impatient noise, almost a scream, and jerked away, going over to the horse to sort with angry precision through the saddlebags.

“Of course,” Dick agreed. “Your highness.”

Jason flinched, but said nothing else, not even when Dick started going back down the trail. He waited until he could be sure Dick was gone, then sighed and dropped his head forward until his forehead rested on the saddle while the horse turned its head to nose at him.

“One day,” he told it, brushing his fingers through its mane. It had survived out here for over a week by itself, living on a trickle of water and the few sprigs of scrub that grew around it. “One day, and we can go home.”

The horse snorted and went back to its grain, and Jason patted it one last time before he followed Dick back down the trail.

* * *

The burned land was something else in daylight, all bright glitter and sharp edges, smears of sunlight burned onto their eyes and shining in greenish afterimages when they blinked. Glass shined at them in scattered chunks, in spikes and sheets along the flanks of dunes, in long flat sweeps on the ground. Dick dismounted to investigate on particularly big sheet of it flowing down the side of a large dune. It moved as one solid piece, the end at the top of the dune shifting upwards when Dick leaned his weight onto the bottom edge of it.

Jason, for his part, got down to look at the long streaks of it on the ground. It looked different to the rest, flat and dull and dirty instead of shiny and clean, and the sandy gaps between the glass sheets were covered in prints that looked like a strange mix of claw marks and hoofprints.

“Well,” he said, “you were right. It’s not a wyrm.” Wyrms did not leave such strange footprints, or any footprints at all. More importantly, it was the first words spoken between them since their argument, and it took a huge chunk of swallowed pride for him to get that much out.

Dick made a humming noise and came over to see what Jason was looking at, and because Jason was watching him, he saw it all- the moment he saw it, realized, the color draining out of his face, the fear in his eyes, all followed by a total shutdown as he slammed a mask into place and wiped all emotion from his expression.

“We need to go,” he said. “Right now, _right now_ , before it knows we’re here, _now_.” He was hurrying Jason as he spoke, pushing into him to force him to his feet. This was different than the previous night, less nervousness and more direct fear, like- 

Like he knew what it was, and it scared him.

“I heard you,” Jason grumbled, although the _before it knows we’re here_ had him lowering his tone. He reached for his camel’s reins and the stupid contrary beast turned its head away. “What is it?”

Dick was already on his own camel, the standing-mount stunt he had pulled at Nanda Parbat suddenly seeming less like a show-off and more like a valuable skill. “Hungry,” he said grimly. “But its territory is big, and we’re near the edge of it- if we can just-”

Whatever they could just, Jason never found out- his camel, annoyed with him trying to pull it around so he could get into the saddle, let out a loud bray. The noise echoed strangely through the dunes, carried far by the wind. Jason listened to it, his breath frozen in his lungs, his very heart not seeming to beat-

A noise answered it, distant but not too far. A chuffing, a rumble. A sound of a large body turning and approaching.

Dick clucked his tongue and the camel finally lowered itself, and Jason was in the saddle before it was halfway down and kicking it to get it back up. “The way station,” Jason said, “it doesn’t seem to like the rock-”

“Go,” Dick ordered, already kicking his own camel into a run, “and if something happens don’t you dare wait for me.”

* * *

It caught up to them halfway there.

Jason caught glimpses at first, something big and bright and violent that flashed into view in the valleys between the dunes. It was not especially fast, but it was big, and camels were not designed to outrun predators like horses were. It paced them, and Jason saw bits of it- a long scaled tail held high overhead, a golden gaze, long talons on bird-like feet that skated easily over glass and stumbled over sand.

And then it was gone, and Jason kicked his camel again, although he didn’t need to. The thing choked the air with the scent of fire, burning and ash, and the camels were well and truly scared now. He looked ahead, hoping to see rocky ground and huts-

“ _Jason_!” 

Jason looked around, and so missed what exactly happened. He saw the fire, though, a beautiful starburst of it that bloomed just ahead of his camel. It brayed and veered off, abandoning the path, its feet sliding on the glass tracks, and Jason heard Dick swear and try to turn his own camel to follow.

And then the creature was there.

It was big, and it blew by too quickly for Jason to properly see it all. He saw heads- multiple heads, a goat’s curving horns and a lion’s blunt muzzle- he saw the furred body, he saw the strange hooved hind legs. He saw the air itself shimmer and spark as the creature rushed past, saw the sand beneath it glow and collapse together, molten.

The camel veered, panicky, and the thing roared and turned for another rush and Jason pulled out his sword, thinking that even something as strange and big as that creature had to have some kind of weakness- but the hilt was burning-hot in his hand, and when he stabbed out, the blade glowed cherry-red and folded uselessly against the creature’s side, melted to softness. The air itself around the creature burned hot enough to melt steel.

The creature roared, and then it was gone again, and Jason had to drop his sword to focus on staying on the camel. The stupid thing was running blind, too terrified even to look ahead, nearly jolting Jason right out of the saddle. He dared to twist around, to look back, and saw nothing of Dick or the creature, just sandy dunes and glittering glass and sunlight reflected and magnified until his eyes were watering and all he could see was light.

The camel came around the dune, and Jason saw something dark flash by at its feet. The half-melted sword he had dropped. They had gone in a circle around the dune.

Jason sat back and pulled the reins back, pulling in as much as he could, and the camel brayed and slowed to a weak-kneed walk. He looked around for any sign- of the monster, of Dick, of where he himself was-

The creature roared, its voice echoing around the dunes. Jason kicked hard, and his camel broke out into a run again, heading reluctantly towards the roars- Dick could give all the orders he wanted, he wasn’t the prince, Jason would do as he pleased and if that meant charging weaponless at a fire-monster he damn well would do it- but then another camel exploded around the curve of the dune.

“Go!” Dick yelled, and Jason wheeled his camel around and went.

They made it past the dune, and another, and then there was a shriek and an explosion of fire and glass and sand as the creature came around a corner, so close Jason could feel its heat baking his skin, too close. It roared, and Jason yelled, a wordless noise-

Dick reached back with his knife and cut the water skin free of the saddle and threw it at the lion’s-head. The skin survived, held it together until it actually hit the lion’s-head in the face. Then it exploded into steam with a sound like sizzling, instantly dropping a blinding fog around them. The creature screamed and a camel brayed, and Jason could not see a thing.

His own camel was fighting him even as he tried to bring it around, panting and crying in terror. It finally yanked its head down, ripping the reins through his hands, and did something like a buck and Jason hit the ground and the camel was gone, braying nonstop as it ran. A second joined it a moment later, the steamy fog lifting, and Jason could see the second camel had blood on its side.

He twisted around and froze- the air was shimmering with heat and moisture, all heat-haze that hid the truth. He could not see Dick, could not see the creature. He was too leery of the latter to call out.

There was another shriek, and he looked to his left. The creature was scrambling gracelessly over the top of a dune, its mismatched feet awkward on the loose sand. Its lion’s-head was held low, the bird’s-head and serpent’s-head swinging around wildly as if pain-blind. It disappeared, shrieking echoing into the distance, and Jason finally let himself breath.

“Dick,” he whispered, loud as he dared.

A hand clamped down on his calf, and Jason kicked out, hit something soft and yielding, and the hand released with a sharp grunt. 

“It’s me,” Dick said, short and breathless, and Jason dared to sit up. The last of the water was evaporating and he could see Dick now, kneeling but doubled over, one hand on the ground near Jason’s feet. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Jason said. His hands were bloody and stinging, and he was bruised and cut up from glass shards and singed from the creature’s fire and heat, but-

-but there had been blood on the camel, and there was blood now, dripping onto the sand from where Dick was bent over.

“Good,” Dick said. “Scalded its face, bought us time. We need to. Find shelter.”

“The huts,” Jason said, and Dick nodded and leaned over further and spat out a mouthful of blood, then just kept sagging forward until he was face-down on the sand, unmoving.

Jason rolled him over and there was blood on his belly, on his side, his clothes blackened and burned and sticking to the wounds, sand already caking onto it.

_You did this_ , a voice very like Talia’s said in his head. _You wanted to be important, and you’ve killed one of the only people you truly, genuinely like for it_.

The huts were a long walk, especially since the camels were long gone, and he could not say how long the creature would be in licking its wounds. He pushed himself up and scooped Dick up under his back and knees and settled him close. He was heavier than he looked, and dead weight.

Jason started walking.

* * *

“It’s not a wyrm.”

It was familiar words, a familiar tone, and Jason had to fight not to drop everything and rush over. Dick was alive, awake. He even sounded strong, or at least not too weak. But Jason kept to his own side of the hut. He had sacrificed his outer robes, which were too loose and flowing and apt to catch fire, and was cutting them down to long strips. No,” he agreed. “It’s a chimera.”

Dick made a noise of agreement. He thumped his head back against the wall Jason had leaned him against, eyes squeezed shut, hand hovering over but not quite touching the mess of his stomach. 

Jason was aimlessly angry, furious- at the Travelers for bringing them out here, for not telling them all they knew- at Dick, for being right about all of it. At himself, for being an idiot, and thinking it would be as simple to kill a fire-breathing monster as it was to kill a man. He had seen the chimera in the bestiary. The first few lines in the entry had said it was native to some island nation to the north, and Jason had written it off as not their monster and moved on. He had been too focused on the wyrm to really consider anything else.

“What do you know about it?” he asked.

“Aside from the obvious?” Dick countered. “It’s only able to breathe fire when in direct sunlight. It never hunts at night.” He hesitated, glanced over at Jason. “It could just be rumors-”

“Tell me,” Jason interrupted impatiently, and Dick shifted and winced and caught his breath on a pained sob. After a few moments, he had settled down enough to answer.

“The chimera is literally fire made flesh, drawing life and form from the sun. It cannot be hunted at night because. As soon as the sun sets it is nothing more than embers and ash.”

“Like a phoenix?” Jason asked. That one, he had paid close attention to, since winged things were less restrained by distance and obstacles than the wingless.

“No,” Dick corrected. “The phoenix isn’t out to destroy or kill, it just _is_ ,” he said. “The chimera is a predator. If it scents our blood, it will follow us all the way back to Nanda Parbat.”

Jason stopped, hands and eyes going still, sinking down onto himself. Then, finally, he looked, lifting his eyes up to Dick, who smiled in pained exhaustion.

“We kill it, or we die out here,” he said quietly, nodding his head towards Jason’s hands- bloody where the camel had pulled the reins through. As though Jason’s injuries were the ones really worth concern. As though it wasn’t only pure luck the chimera’s talons had cauterized his own wounds even while inflicting them, and that was the only reason he hadn’t bled out already.

“I say we kill it,” Jason said, and scooped up his makeshift bandages and moved over to Dick. He handed him a long piece of leather from what had once been his camel’s reins and indicated for him to bite down on it, then pulled him up away from the wall without asking and lifted the ruined tunic up to better inspect the injury. It was a bloody, blackened mess, so Jason poured a palmful of their precious water from his personal water skin onto a piece of cloth and swiped across it the wound gently, cleaning it off as much he could, until the cloth was too dirty to be useful and was only just smearing around the blood and the soot. Then he folded some of the strips down into a thick pad of fabric and pressed it over the wound without ceremony.

Dick bit down on the leather in his mouth and screamed, arching away and clawing at Jason’s arms without thinking. Jason held on until Dick slumped against him, too much in shock to keep fighting, then began to wind more strips around his waist to tie the pad into place.

“Dick,” he said, jerking the shoulder Dick’s head had fallen against, jostling him back into awareness. “Stay with me, guardsman, I didn’t say we were done yet.”

“Sorry,” Dick said thickly around the leather strip, which he spit out. “Highness. Meant no disrespect.”

“You said glass melts at a higher temperature than steel,” Jason said, nudging him again when he took too long to respond.

“Sand,” Dick corrected. “Glass is already. Half-melted. Still flows like fluid.”

“It walks on the glass though,” Jason said thoughtfully, remembering. Those awkward mismatched feet, hooves and talons, were not good for walking “So it’s hot enough to melt steel, but not its own glass.”

“Double-edged knife,” Dick murmured, and Jason nudged him again, shifting Dick up so his face was resting against the bare skin of Jason’s neck and he could feel for the beginnings of a fever- but then he realized.

“Use the glass to kill it,” he said, and felt Dick’s lips turn up in a smile.

He thought about it, while they waited for the sun to go down. He climbed up on the wall of the hut and looked around. He thought about the glass sheet on the side of the dune, like water flowing down a hill, how it had wobbled when Dick had put pressure on it, like it would rise into the air with a little bit of leverage. He planned, and he waited.

The chimera did not show itself again, although they heard it plenty. Its cries and grunts and long coughing roars echoed across the dunes for hours. It did not approach the huts, either because it was leery after being wounded, or because it simply had not thought to look there, Jason couldn’t say.

A few minutes before sunset, and the chimera abruptly went silent- if the rumors were right, it was burning off like the last gasp of campfire before the embers guttered out- and Jason stirred. He did not put much stock in rumors, but they had to risk it. Dick wouldn’t survive another day here.

“Can you stand?” he asked as he came across the hut to crouch near Dick. For a moment there was no response, just blue eyes burning fever-bright blinking at him. Then Dick nodded.

“I can try,” he said, and held out a hand for Jason to help him up. “Where?”

“The spring,” Jason said, rising up and pulling Dick up as gently as he could. Dick whimpered and cried out and curled in on himself, arm hovering protectively over his wound, but he made it up., and stayed decently steady on his feet even without Jason’s support. “I can't carry you up that trail.”

Dick leaned into him, and nodded weakly- but there was cold fire in his eyes, and when he straightened up again he stood steady. “We have to go now,” he said, looking out the doorway. The sunset was painting the desert a truly beautiful array of colors, blues and greens and purples all shining off a sea of glass, but Jason was already aware of the dawn that would follow too soon after. There was so much to be done before then.

Jason ducked under his arm, supporting him, half carrying him, and led him out of the hut and into the desert.

* * *

The horse was still at the spring, which was a relief- Jason would need it before this was done. It lifted its head and watched as the two humans stumbled into its little cavern, one weak-kneed and stumbling, slipping from the other’s grasp and falling across the rocky ground. He stifled a scream and twisted onto his back but the damage was done, fresh blood already rising up to stain the makeshift bandages.

Jason, exhausted and in pain himself, knelt near the trickle of water and scooped up as much of it as he could, drinking it down gratefully, dust taste and all. He even fed a little bit through Dick’s cracked lips- it was not a good idea to give anything to a gut-stabbed man without a physician’s approval, but Jason thought about the odds of Dick ever seeing anyone else again, and gave him the water.

“I have to go,” Jason said when he had drank as much as he dared. Dick nodded in understanding, but Jason kept talking. When he left-

“I need- can I have these?” he asked, pulling the sticks out of Dick’s belt. He was lethal with them, Jason had seen him use them in sparring matches with other guards. Long enough, and round- they would do nicely for what Jason needed them for.

“Escrima,” Dick whispered, answering the unasked question.

“I’ll be back when I’ve killed it,” Jason said, and Dick looked at him and nodded again.

“I know,” he said.

Jason stared down at him, about to be left to die alone, and saw the serene smile, the calm acceptance. He dropped to his knees and put his hand on Dick’s shoulder and leaned into him, smelling sweat and blood and ash, pressed his face into Dick’s hair, felt Dick’s lips against his neck.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked, brave in the face of death, knowing for a fact he would never see this man alive again. “I’ve wanted to since the first time I saw you, and now-”

“Jason,” Dick said, pushing him back, and Jason went with a noise like ripping as his heart tore in two- but then Dick pulled him back in, down, and pressed a kiss against his lips. “I know,” he said again, and Jason would have died from embarrassment any other time- of course Dick knew, he had been so obvious- but instead Jason leaned into him and kissed him again, and again, and again.

* * *

He left with the escrima sticks and the horse, and he did not once look back.


	4. Chapter 4

It took hours.

Hours, long and bloody and burning even in the dark of night. Each shoveled handful of sand slipped and fell halfway back into place, undoing half his work instantly. He used his hands, his feet, pulled his boots off and used them. He got sand in his mouth, his nose, his eyes, grinding into a thousand small cuts, sticking sweatily to his skin.

He alternated digging with chipping away at the top, when he was too overworked and overheated to breathe properly. He used the hilt of his knife to crack the top of the sheet, broke off chunks to leave long jagged teeth at the end. The shards bit at his hands and the knife slipped and scored his hands and wrists countless times, and he tore off strips of his tunic to stop himself bleeding out before he could do this.

He finished an hour before dawn, the trenches dug, the fulcrums wedged into place. He tested it once- he could not risk it breaking, but he also could not let it go untested and throw away his only chance on a failed plan- and smiled grimly when the sheet of glass rose, wobbly and unsteady, ready to break under its own weight, jagged points raised into the air like the teeth of a waiting predator.

He marked the hill with what was left of his sword, burying it halfway to the hilt in the sand, a long bloodied strip of tunic tied to it just in case.

Then he went to go get the horse.

* * *

The chimera stirred at dawn, its strange coughing roars echoing across the dunes. The horse pulled at the reins and danced nervously on the spot at the noise, but held steady under Jason’s hand, even when the burn smell reached them. The poor animal would most likely die today, although luck and panic-fueled speed might save it yet.

Sunlight touched the valley, shining mercilessly on glass and sand, and the chimera emerged.

It followed its own fire-blasted trails like they were roads, its odd mismatched feet finding easy traction on the glass. It went straight to the spot where Dick had fallen, lion’s-head lowering to sniff hopefully. Its tail rose up like a scorpion’s tail, and now that he knew it was there, Jason could see that it was not a tail at all, but a third head, a serpent’s-head with unblinking eyes and long needle fangs. It looked around, swept its gaze across the landscape, landed on Jason and stopped.

The horse was frozen steady under Jason, watching as the chimera lifted its other heads to look at them. It was tense, ready to run, but Jason pulled up on the reins so tight its chin pulled back. They couldn’t go, not yet- they had to wait, had to tempt the chimera to chase and not circle around, but they could not wait to long and risk its breath, or the horse slipping in the loose sand.

The chimera turned all three of its faces towards him, the lips pulling back to show the lion’s teeth. There were no marks on its furred face, no scalded blisters to show for the fight yesterday. It turned and prowled forward, the sand around it crackling and shimmering with heat. The horse jerked away, pulled back and settled only when Jason hauled back on the reins. Not yet, not yet-

The serpent’s-head lolled its mouth open, and a glass shard halfway between chimera and horse popped and broke, molten glass spilling out of it slowly. 

Jason let up on the reins and gave a kick of his heels, and the horse ran.

Around, off the glass path but in the track between dunes. The horse ran its hardest to escape the fire-thing at its heels and once again Jason could barely see for the sand and the sunlight and the dazzle of glass, but this was different- the horse was faster, built for running, and better trained to follow leads, a more familiar ride and comfortable for it. The chimera easily fell behind with its strange feet not meant for running. Jason dared to look, saw the ripple in the air, the fire streaming from the serpent’s-head’s nostrils-

He threw his weight to the left, and the horse turned hard, and fire bloomed like a poppy to the right, turning a dune into glassy slag. It took precious seconds to recover, to circle wide and come around, and the chimera was close enough for a second to bite at the banner of the horse’s tail with its sharp lion teeth. Jason could feel the heat of it baking his skin.

A curve, a sharp turn, the horse spraying sand up with its hooves as it jackknifed its body around. The chimera merely slid out and screamed. Jason threw his weight again, and the horse plunged up the side of a dune, sinking into soft sand up to its hocks. It was panicking, eyes rolling, lathery sweat on its neck. The chimera hissed and chuffed, and Jason thought- _I won’t make it_ -

He threw himself off the horse, stuck and foundering in sand, leaving it to what luck it may have, and ran up the dune himself, running doubled over and digging his hands into sand to help keep his balance and keep him moving. The horse screamed and he did not look back.

Over the top of the dune- there was his sword- and skidding down the other slope on his side, his shredded tunic pulling up, his skin blistering raw against hot scraping sand.

The sheet of glass glittered in the early sunlight, looking no different than any other piece of glass in this unnatural land. Jason rolled over until he was just beneath it, scrambling to keep himself in place- half the dune had followed him down, he hadn’t planned for that-

The chimera appeared at the dune’s crest, and Jason threw himself forward onto the base of the glass sheet, pushing it down into the trench he had dug out. His weight was leverage, Dick’s escrima sticks wedged under the sheet were the fulcrum- the far end of the glass sheet rose, trembling under its own weight. Half of it cracked and cleaved clean off, falling in shards, but there was still one good point at the other end, and it lifted higher and held steadier for having shed the excess weight.

The chimera roared in triumph, and came down the dune, focused on Jason and blind to the danger.

Jason twisted around so his back was to the chimera, teeth gritted and head down and arms coming up to protect his neck-

-the chimera hit the glass and shoved it backwards, shoved Jason down, drove the blunt end of the glass against him, ground him into the sand. He gasped a mouthful of grit and heard a noise like nothing else, smelled blood and burning.

A great weight landed on him, slammed him down further into the sand, heat and pain, and he screamed. It was gone again a moment later, tumbling boneless down the dune, but Jason stayed where he was. He was on fire, he was in agony. He was sobbing against the sand, choking on grit. He heard it land, heard nothing else but the wind and his own whimpers. He dared to lift his head- surprised to find he could.

The chimera lay sprawled at the foot of the dune, a great glittering spike of glass impaling its chest. None of its heads moved.

Jason watched it, waited for it to get up. He blinked, and the sunlight was slanting into afternoon shadows, although it had been dawn mere minutes ago. The chimera was still unmoving.

He was still in pain, but not so much now that he could not even think. His back was pure agony, and his head pounded, but he could push himself up to his knees easily enough, his feet after a few false starts. He thought about climbing up the dune and threw up into the sand, then slid down instead, trying to stay away from the chimera.

On the ground was different. He had forgotten what it was like to stand on solid ground, not on the sand that had been so long his enemy and ally. He stumbled when the ground did not give under his feet, fell to his knees and gagged again. His head hurt too much for such jarring. He crawled instead, hands and knees like a child.

There was a noise ahead of him, and he jerked back, terrified- _the chimera_. But the feet he saw, through the dizzying swirl of moving too fast, were all hooves, all matched. He followed the legs up.

The scout’s horse, tired and singed and still somehow alive. It had not left him- it did not know where to go in this maze of sand and glass. It came closer when he did not move again, snuffling at him, touching him with its nose.

Jason clucked his tongue, but the horse just stared at him- right. That one was for camels. He looked up at it- it was not a very large horse but it seemed impossibly tall now. He took a fistful of reins and pulled on it, trying to use the horse to pull himself to his feet, but the reins creaked and snapped, dried and burned, and Jason landed hard. He screamed despite himself, every injury jarring awake again, and the horse jerked away. Jason could not chase it down, mount it and ride it to the spring. Jason could not stand up. Jason could not even see anymore, the world swimming into greyish darkness.

At least the chimera was dead. At least he had done that much.

He closed his eyes, and slept.

* * *

He woke, and there were hands on him, a figure over him, a voice speaking to him. He heard it like his head was underwater.

He said _Dick_ , and tasted blood. The voice said something else.

A hand on his face, a gentle touch, and he closed his eyes.

\---

He woke, and he was naked and wet. A cold cloth touched his back, soothing the pain there. He was on his belly on something soft.

He said _Dick_ , and a voice answered with words he did not know. It sounded offended.

Another voice responded, and the cloth came away from his skin. Someone said something to him, leaned closer and said it again and again, as many times as he asked. He lives. He lives. He lives.

He closed his eyes- he had not really opened them- and slept.

\---

He woke, and there was a hand in his. 

He said _Dick_ , and the hand squeezed his tight.

\---

He woke, and this time he was _awake_.

* * *

They had been saved, he learned, by the Travelers.

On the third day, when he was coherent enough to do more than stare stupidly at Dick, Jason tried to ask if they had come back for them, or had perhaps been watching from afar and knew it was safe to return. The old woman who had been tending to them- the old woman who had given them the ointment on the road, the old woman with the cactus juice- smiled and said something in her language and brought him food instead, stew and flat bread. Dick, his stomach wrapped in bandages, was on strict rations of water and weak soup, and he glared unhappily when Jason got a handful of precious dried apricots after he finished his stew. The woman gathered up the bowls and said something to Dick and left.

Jason gnawed on an apricot and watched Dick out of the corner of his eye. He was pale, tight lines of pain around his eyes and mouth, and moving slow and careful like an old man. He smiled a real smile when he caught Jason looking at him, and it stole Jason’s breath.

“I thought you were dead,” he said. He was woozy still from blood loss and heat exhaustion and the concussion, and he felt muzzy-headed and stupid. He had tried to sit up once and was still dealing with the bouts of vertigo and nausea and the pain in his back, where the skin was stretched tight as a drum, blistered and baked. It would be weeks before he could suffer wearing even the lightest of shirts, and he would be forever scarred.

“I’m not the one who rode off alone to kill a chimera,” Dick pointed out. He sounded calm and confident, like he had been sure from the start that all would be well, which Jason figured meant he had been very scared indeed.

“I killed it,” Jason said, remembering the huge body slumped at the bottom of the dune, bloodied glass sticking out of it.

“I know,” Dick said.

He was close enough to touch, so Jason did, reaching out to brush his fingers over Dick’s thigh. Dick went very still, long enough that Jason thought he must have done something wrong and started to pull away, then he sighed and put his hand down over Jason’s, trapping it gently against his leg.

“I was better off without this,” he said, soft and quiet and helpless, and Jason made a curious noise but did not look away from the hypnotizing contrast of his pale skin against Dick’s honeyed tone. Dick’s other hand reached over and brushed Jason’s hair out of his eyes, uselessly as it fell right back into place.

“Get some rest,” Dick said gently. “We need to talk, and it would be nice if you were actually here for it.”

“I’m here,” Jason said. He wasn’t, though, not really- the world had gone soft and fuzzy and it was hard to focus his thoughts, and all he cared about was the steady pressure of Dick’s hand against his.

“The maji drugged your stew,” Dick said patiently, and Jason said huh, because that actually made sense- it didn’t hurt as much anymore.

He put his head down and closed his eyes, and Dick’s hand twisted against his, turning so their fingers intertwined, and Jason smiled.

* * *

There was someone else in the tent when Jason woke up next.

Dick was down for once, facing away from Jason- the chimera’s talons had laid him open from sternum to right hip, forcing him to lay on his left side, and Jason wasn’t mobile enough to rearrange them- and sleeping uneasily. Jason watched him for a long while at first, then became all at once aware that someone was watching him, and he twisted around to find a mismatched pair of eyes regarding him with amusement.

“You could be more obvious, if you really tried,” the Kefa said, then waved him down when Jason tried to at least leverage himself up onto his elbows. “Be still, I meant no harm. You’ve earned some peace.”

Jason lowered himself again with a pained exhale, staring down at the weave of the linen bedding below him. “You said you would not come back for us,” he said.

“We weren’t going to,” the Traveler said with a shrug. “But the morning of the fifth day you were gone, the sun went dark like a cloud was moving across it, although the sky was clear. Our maji said it meant the beast was dead, and two of our fastest riders agreed to go see what was left of you. Imagine our surprise when one of the riders returns and says you both yet live.”

Jason opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He lowered his head again, took a deep breath and tried again. “Thank you,” he said.

“The least of what we could do,” the Kefa said easily. “We sent for a wagon to take you back to Hyador. We can send a messenger to the citadel from there, if needed.”

If Jason could stand, or even just sit upright, before they reached the city, they would not need a messenger. The guards at the city gate would know him and let him pass through, and most likely set him up in some noble’s villa while sending word to Talia with an official messenger. Assuming, of course, that Dick was correct, and Talia did not orchestrate all of this to remove Jason from Nanda Parbat entirely.

“Your maji tended to us?” he asked instead of trying to think that one out.

“Yes,” the man said. “She says your friend is very lucky, and the wounds are not very deep. The burns made it look worse than it really was. She cleaned it up and gave him teas and medicines to purge the infection from his blood.”

Jason looked back over at Dick. “So he will live?”

“Live, yes, with nothing to show for it but the scars,” the Kefa said. “You are less lucky. She says the muscles and skin in your back were cooked like meat and will tighten up as they heal, so you will not be as flexible as you used to be.” He shifted and cleared his throat, and Jason realized he was drifting again, hypnotized by the steady motion of Dick’s breathing. “We found your horse.”

“You can keep it,” Jason said, and the Kefa grinned, sharp like a knife.

“Well, in that case, we found your camels as well. They came running up to us as we came back this way and fell right into line like they belonged there.”

Jason huffed a laugh at the man’s shamelessness. “Them too,” he said. “I don’t like camels anyway.”

“My friend,” the Kefa said, “this has been a most profitable arrangement for both of us. If you ever have need of our help again, my tribe will be happy to assist.”

Jason blinked and frowned, about to ask what that meant- he had in no way profited from this except in the chimera’s death, which was an empty reward- but then his gaze drew back to Dick like metal filings to a lodestone, and he decided that it had been profitable indeed.

* * *

The fifth day Jason could, with care and steadiness, sit upright without either his back or his head trying to kill him. He even managed to stand up and walk a few steps from the tent to relieve himself. He could feel it already, the tightness in his shoulders, across his ribs, where his sapling flexibility had dried up to wooden-plank stiffness. It was aggravating, the feeling of having spent days cooped up inside with no physical activity to keep the body limber.

When he came back inside and sat down- a long and arduous process that required the help of the maji and a strong man- Dick was sitting up waiting for him. He watched in silence as the Travelers left, and Jason watched him. So they were going to talk about it after all, now, when Jason could sit up and look on Dick as an equal.

So Jason started it, seizing control of the conversation before Dick could. “I shouldn’t have kissed you,” he said quietly, as close to humble as he could get, eyes cast down the the tarp-covered ground between them.

 

“Probably not,” Dick agreed, sounding thoughtful more than offended or disgusted. “But I think we’re saying that for different reasons.”

“You felt obligated to kiss me,” Jason explained. This was already going to hurt enough, he didn’t need Dick trying to make it better by making light of it. “You knew that I- I wanted to-”

“Fuck me,” Dick said with devastating calmness, and Jason flinched despite himself. “Yes, I knew. I’ve seen it before.”

Well, that just made it worlds worse. Jason thought about the city where Dick’s parents died, where he lost his tribe- where he had been rescued at the last second, saved from being a playtoy for someone rich and powerful and inclined to such things- and felt sick. Was that how Dick saw him, no better than those people?

“And I never felt obligated,” Dick added.

“I’m a prince,” Jason said through gritted teeth, as if Dick had forgotten, and Dick huffed a laugh.

“You have a perfectly functional right hand, and if you had forced the issue before now, I would have invited you to make full use of it,” Dick said, and Jason finally looked up at him and saw the carefree smile, the casual shrug. “I was raised on the road between kingdoms, Jason. I never experienced fealty as you did. A prince is just a boy with some gold around his head, as far as I’m concerned.”

He had not realized how badly he was suffocating under some terrible weight until it suddenly lifted. “You wanted to kiss me,” he said, numb with the realization.

“I’ve never kissed anyone I didn’t want to,” Dick said, and his smile was gentler now that Jason had gotten the point and no longer needed reassuring. “And I’d like to do it again, if you’re okay with it.”

Jason had received love letters written in the finest hand, on expensive wood-pulp paper, smelling of subtle perfumes and sex. He had had poetry fit to make a grown man blush whispered into his ear by lovers draped over his body. He had had women lean forward so artfully that they almost-but-not-quite spilled out of their dress, had had men pick him up and hold him and kiss him in a display of strength that left him breathless. And yet, somehow, he had never been so thoroughly seduced as he was by those two simple sentences.

He pushed up onto his knees and reached out, and Dick met him halfway, sliding in and folding gently around him, ever mindful of their injuries. And this kiss was not the sweet, heartbreaking goodbye of their kisses in the desert, but hungry, devouring. Dick pushed his hands through Jason’s hair, tangling his fingers into the burnt-short part at the back of his head, and slid his lips down to kiss Jason’s jaw, his pulse point, his neck, while Jason wrapped Dick’s shirt around his fists and gasped.

He was trembling with the effort of holding himself up, and he could feel Dick measuring his breath to control the pain, so he pulled, and Dick came back up. “We can’t,” he said, and Dick hummed in agreement and kissed him again, and Jason lost himself in that until he had to stop, had to rest his forehead against Dick’s and just breathe while his back burned with the tension of being upright.

Dick settled back against the pile of bedding he used for support and pulled Jason forward until he was slumped against Dick’s left side. It took the pressure off both of them, and put Jason’s face in the crook of Dick’s neck, where he promptly began kissing and nipping until he had worried a pretty bruise to the skin’s surface. Dick let him, gasped and moaned quietly under him, let his head fall to the side for better access, and stroked his arm when Jason was done.

“What was your reason?” Jason asked after a while. “For thinking we shouldn’t have kissed,” he added when Dick hummed in question.

Dick didn’t answer at first. When he finally did, he did so with a heavy sigh. “I was only supposed to stay in Nanda Parbat for a few months, six at most. Except I kept coming up with reasons to not leave.” He turned his head, rested his chin in Jason’s hair, as if to confirm that Jason was his newest reason.

“You can still leave,” Jason said, and- “I’ll go with you.”

Dick went tense under him, but kept whatever he had been about to say to himself. After a few moments he said, “Talk to Talia first. I know what it’s like, to push someone away and regret it.”

“Your dark man?” Jason asked, but when Dick didn’t answer, he dared to push himself away and up and saw the pain in Dick’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, contrite, and Dick smiled.

“It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last,” he said. “We’ll sort it out, we always do.” He tugged, and Jason went back down to lay against him. It was undignified, but- they weren’t in Nanda Parbat yet. Jason wasn’t a prince for miles more, just a man in pain, seeking comfort from his almost-lover.

“Even if it goes well with Talia, I think I will still travel,” he said quietly. “I can do something as Talia’s voice in other lands. There’s no real place for me at Nanda Parbat anymore.” He paused, considering. “I suppose I’ll need a guard, or at least a companion. Do you happen to know someone who knows the roads?”

“I should make you beg,” Dick said grumpily, and Jason leaned into him and laughed.

* * *

There were riders at the tent city at Hyador, royal riders with green and blue fabric on their saddles, ribbons tying back their horses’ manes. Two of them wheeled about and rode hard for Hyador when they saw the caravan approaching.

“Welcome home,” the Kefa said dryly. Jason was sitting in the other driver’s seat beside him, sheltered from the sun in the shade of the canyon wall. “If I’m right, we’re about to have company.”

And he was- the wagon had only traveled another mile or so when the riders returned, their numbers tripled. They met the caravan halfway, and had a long discussion with the forward rider, then turned and fell into place around the caravan, escorting it not to the tent city but Hyador itself.

“Do you see,” Dick said quietly. He had come up to the front of the wagon and leaned forward to see over Jason’s shoulder; Jason followed his gaze and found himself looking at a figure standing on the wall of the city. A figure dressed in green, dark hair tied back in a long braid. It was too far to tell the details, but Jason knew her as well as he knew himself, could read her moods in the broadest strokes of her stance- it was taking all her restraint not to come riding out herself. And just like that, Jason missed her desperately, and wanted nothing more than to forgive her.

The Kefa let them ride a ways more in silence, and only turned to speak when they had stopped in the shadows of Hyador’s walls. “It was a great honor to meet you both,” he said. “My people shall remember you, and tell the tale of your-” and he ended with a word Jason did not know, and turned away again. Jason looked back to Dick, who grimaced.

“It means brave stupidity,” he said quietly. “It describes a man who did a very dumb thing and is lucky to have lived.”

“Well,” Jason said, and shrugged, acknowledging the truth of it.

A royal rider came up to help Jason get down from the wagon, holding his arm in support even after Jason was steady on his feet and tried to shake him off. He guided Jason up past the caravan and to Hyador’s gates, where Talia’s impatience had finally defeated her sense of duty and she stood waiting. She drew him close, hands gentle on his shoulders, turned him to see the damage and turned him back to hug him, ever-so-careful of his back.

“I was worried,” she said simply, and Jason pulled back, held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders.

“You sent me out there,” he said. He did not ask, he did not accuse. He stated a simple fact. Talia looked at him with a steady gaze, not flinching or apologizing.

“You needed to prove yourself,” she said. “And a wyrm is safe enough to slay, with some help.” She looked beyond him, to Dick who had fallen into place at Jason’s elbow, silent and still and face perfectly blank, masks firmly back in place.

“It wasn’t a wyrm,” Jason said, and Talia blinked at him in a rare display of open confusion, and- that was what saved them, Jason decided. That she so clearly had not considered that it could be something else, that she might be sending him to his death at the claws of a strange beast from some distant island- the tight tense knot of misery in his gut loosened and he breathed easier, safe in the knowledge that Talia did not want him dead.

“Oh?” she asked, mildly curious, and Jason shook his head and glanced up at the sun- he could feel its heat on his shoulders even in the shade, and he could see Dick going pale and starting to fidget. They needed to get inside and rest some more, preferably on something that did not move.

“Chimera,” he said, and watched her roll the strange word on her tongue, and pressed against her shoulders just a little harder. “We should get inside, we have much to talk about and I need to sit down.”

Talia looked at Dick again, her eyes lingering on his neck, the bruise Jason had left on it. “So we do,” she said, and pressed one hand over one of Jason’s, then stepped away. Dick waited until she was out of earshot before sighing.

“Well,” he said ruefully, “now I definitely have to leave, or she’s going to start trying to kill me again.”

“She’s not going to- _again_?” Jason demanded, turning to face him, and Dick smiled and laughed.

“It was only for the first few months, and it was actually kind of fun. Like a battle of wits. And she lost, obviously, I’m still here-”

Jason stepped closer to him, nearly touching him, and Dick thankfully stopped talking and looked up at him with his incredible eyes instead.

“I won’t let her hurt you,” Jason said, a solemn promise, and Dick bit his lip to control the smile that tried to surface.

“My hero,” he said, but he could not quite swallow the snigger that escaped, and Jason snorted and leaned over to steal a kiss, then another, until one of the gatesmen cleared his throat and they both jerked away from the other.

“We should-” Jason began, making a vague and useless gesture, imagining being in the same room as Dick with Talia there. She would forgive him the indiscretion- he was no longer crown prince, and that afforded him a lot of freedom he hadn’t previously had- but she wouldn’t like that indiscretion being with Dick.

“I can’t go far, I’ll be easy to find when you’re done with the Queen,” Dick said easily, and smiled and added “your highness” in the least respectful tone Jason had ever heard, then turned and walked away, leaving Jason to stare after him until the gatesman cleared his throat again.

Then Jason turned away and followed after Talia, grinning stupidly all the while, imagining the future so shiny and new, glittering bright as chimera-glass under the desert sun.


End file.
